Since yahoo's directory really has nothing to do with Bing search I would assume really nothing changes there and yahoo retains 100% ownership of the directory.

I too have wondered about this...The only thing I could find on it is this...

There are many unknowns around this. However, in response to a specific question about it, Yahoo’s CEO Carol Bartz stated "paid inclusion, we'll decide on that later"

My guess is that around the middle of 2010 Yahoo will have to lose all paid inclusion customers. that, of course, if they really want to compete with Google...

Paid inclusion doesn't work in today's world, unless Google decides to do it.

Yahoo’s CEO Carol Bartz stated "paid inclusion, we'll decide on that later"

I just love definitive answers like that.

StoutFiles, can you be more specific? Why could it not work unless Google does it? Are you talking about volume, or something else?

I don't know if you all heard, but PI will be going away as of 12/31/09. Yahoo announced today!

StoutFiles, can you be more specific? Why could it not work unless Google does it? Are you talking about volume, or something else?

Google's monopoly on search would make it work for them.

I think the Paid Inclusion they are referring to is for URL spidering/Trusted Feed paid inclusion. That died a while ago really.

The editorial directory payment (where it still exists) is for a review - not a guarantee of inclusion (unlike the URL paid inclusion program which is a guarantee of inclusion - but not ranking).

Barry reported it in SERoundtable [seroundtable.com].

makemetop

That's exactly what I was thinking while reading the thread. There seems to be a confusion between paid inclusion and the Y! Directory listings.

[...] unlike the URL paid inclusion program which is a guarantee of inclusion - but not ranking

Not quite. There's a review process for paid inclusion, a.k.a. Search Submit Basic or Pro, as well. No guarantees. Having said that, I cannot get to the Search Submit Basic section on the Yahoo! website anymore, but Position Tech still appears to include it among its services.

One of my site gets its 90% traffic from SMX.

Google Adwords & Overture (yahoo ads accounts) could never handle the number of URLs (keywords) that I was able to submit to SMX (7 figure).

I am going to miss SMX for sure.

There are other paid inclusions in Yahoo, I have paid $57 per URL to be included in Yahoo.

We've used Search Submit Pro (the pay-per-click fee-based version of) paid inclusion program at Yahoo! for years and spent millions each year on it. It has proven quite profitable for us in a very highly competitive vertical. And let there be no mistake about it - SSP DOES affect your organic rankings.

We actually accidently let our SSP contract expire last year after years of participating. We had ranked #1 or 2 for years in our very highly competitive vertical for the most sought after 1 and 2-word keyword phrases in our vertical. On the very DAY the contract expired, our rankings for those SSP keyword phrases dropped to the 20s, 30s, and even 40s.

At the time we freaked trying to figure out why our Yahoo! rankings had tanked. Of course, our Google and MSN/Live traffic remained the same. The ONLY think we could attribute it to was the SSP contract expiring or possibly some major change to Yahoo's ranking algorithm. So we let it ride for 3-4 months to see if our rankings would improve. They didn't.

About 4 months later we signed new contracts and this time set up our SSP feeds through Outrider. On the day the feeds were in place... BAM! our rankings returned to normal... back to #1 and #2 for almost all of our major keywords.

However, since about mid-August Yahoo! rankings for these SSP keyword phrases have slowly started dropping again... not by 20, 30, or 40 positions... but more like dropping by 5 or 10 positions... I figured this was Yahoo! slowly backing off on the influence that SSP had on organic rankings in preparation for Bing not supporting it and have since cancelled SSP participation.

We have weekly if not daily conference calls w/ Yahoo, Google, Microsoft regarding all of our paid advertising as well as on site quarterly business reviews. In the last Yahoo! QBR I asked how they were going to handle SSP now that the plans were for Bing to power their organic search results. The answer was that they didn't know. I felt at the time that it would likely be sunset because Microsoft wouldn't want to degrade their search results by implementing such a "feature". I guess this is confirmation of that.

This is going to be a big revenue loss for Yahoo! & PT. It's also going to smack agencies and "marketing managers" hard. Why? How much of "paid inclusion" sales revenue for merchants comes from agencies putting the client's homepage in there or a search or marketing manager signing off on the program because it will make them look good?

When reporting to a client it makes the program look phenomenal if you bundle shopping engines and the Yahoo! feed together in a report with the homepage in the feed, you can make anything look like a killer investment no matter how bad or expensive the rest of the shopping engines perform. The marketing managers are going to lose a ton of what was their ROI to the general site sales bucket or organic search.