Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Why Yahoo Can't Sell Search

I want to thank Yahoo for sending me a notification today that my credit card was going to be charged $150 again for the privilege of being listed on search index. It allowed me to (try) to remove my payment information to avoid wasting another $150 this year. It seems that with Yahoo stupidity has not bounds. Not only did they charge me to get our site indexed on a timely basis, they failed to deliver on the stated benefits. For the past year Yahoo delivered a whopping .04% of DigitalChalk organic search traffic and it took them SEVEN MONTHS to get us into their index. Of the 492 websites that provided me with referral traffic in the past 12 months, Yahoo ranked 17th behind AOL, ASK! and news.com (all of whom I did not do anything to get indexed with). Do I need to tell you who was first? Of course not. I paid nothing to Google for my site to be indexed and through simple SEO activities we moved from start-up to a PR4 in our first five months.

I'm happy to spend my SEM budget on Google. Now that they are supplying the ads for Yahoo search I'll get placement on whatever paltry search scraps Yahoo throws my way.

Oh, by the way, you can't cancel with Yahoo. Once they take your credit card, it's a black hole. You have to see this from their FAQ to believe it. To stop paying them the $150 I had to change my credit card information to something bogus. There is no such thing as cancellation when it comes to paid listings on Yahoo. The reason given? "For security reasons, we are not able to close customer accounts." Who's security are you protecting Yahoo? Jerry, it's not going to work buddy! Carl, save yourself the humiliation, there is nothing worth saving.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I completely agree. But it goes beyond that. There is this silly notion in their business model that assumes I am going to go to one site, and get all my information from that one site. I've looked at their website, and quite frankly, they would have to do ALOT to get me to stay and turn it into my 'home base' for information.

The second part is bloat. They don' know when too much is annoying. They keep cramming more and more stuff onto their front page. Keep it simple like Google has - that is the reason why I keep with Google.

Will the new CEO change things? no. It would require a major culture change from within Yahoo; it would require a complete removal of at least 3 layers of management, and a fresh leader who is devoid of all the high flying IT nonsense that seems to plague management from silicon valley.

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