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How To Distinguish Paid vs Organic Listings
A lot of people probably don’t even realize that the listings are paid and not organic. The listings themselves may look the same if the manager has used the same Titles & Descriptions for their pages. You can be identify these paid listings by this in the string http%3a//rdrw1.yahoo.com/click.

• Sample Search Submit Pro CPC Listing

Why Do I Care?
On a given Yahoo! search results page there are 10 organic listings and 14 PPC listings. When more and more paid listings creep into these natural 10 it reduces the amount of real estate left over for organic search results. Do you know how many organic spots are left for the keywords you’re targeting? While doing a few spot checks on popular keywords I noticed an alarming amount of CPC listings, some 50% or more. That means there are 19 PPC listings and 5 organic listings. That’s horrible. I was curious how this affected the different keyword markets. I grabbed the top keywords for each market KeywordDiscovery.com’s “Industry Terms” directory and to get a feel for the impact on heavily monetized keywords I then took the top keywords from this list of “top paying keywords“. I then checked the top 10 rankings for each and documented the # of paid listings found. Below are the results.

As you can see the top keywords listed in each industry are not heavily saturated with Search Submit Pro CPC listings. Only 32 of the 132 keywords, 24%, have CPC listings and only 4 of them, 3%, have 5 or more paid listings. This could be due to many of them being domain names and brand names. We then see that 70% of the keywords in the “Top Paying Keywords” list have Search Submit Pro! CPC listings, and 33% of those keywords have 50% or more CPC listings.

Reviewing these keywords you can see that the financial industry is pretty saturated. The majority of the keywords with 50% or more of the top 10 rankings being CPC listings are finance related. I decided to pull and evaluate the top searched keywords for the “loans” category. In the left column of the first graph below are the top 30 keywords returned for “loans” by KeywordDiscovery.com and the number of paid listings found in the top 10 rankings for each keyword. The second table is the same keywords and paid listing data but sorted in descending order of number of paid listings. When checking the rankings I see that 26 of the 30 keywords have at least 1 CPC listing representing an 86% saturation. Of these, 16 of the 30 have 50% or more CPC listings, representing 53% saturation. Some keywords like “home equity loans” and “online loans” are 100% CPC listings which means there are ZERO organic listings within the first page of search results on Yahoo!. Other gems are “loans”, “home loans”, and “cash loans” which weigh in with 9 of the top 10 results being paid listings from Search Submit Pro. Damn…that’s brutal.

I found this article from 2002 on SEW where Danny evaluated the Paid Content Disclosure on each search engne. As Danny states:

Yahoo: Paid listings sold by Yahoo are clearly labeled as “Sponsor Matches,” along with a helpful link that says, “What are Sponsor Matches?,” leading to a further explanation. As for paid inclusion, some “Web Site Matches” will be for sites that appear because they had to pay a mandatory fee to be reviewed. This is not clear on the search results page. Further, clicking on the “Help” link on the search page, while bringing up a page describing the search results, does not make clear some sites must pay a fee to be listed with Yahoo. Fail. Finally, for content promotion, this happens in the “Inside Yahoo” area, a clear-enough heading and which is also explained on the search help page.

Danny’s comment on the lack of disclosure within Yahoo!’s search results is still true today. That said, they have updated the information within their “About this page” section that is linked from the search results. It now states:

Web Results and Local Results may have financial relationships with Yahoo!, but have not paid for placement. Web Results may include links to sites that participate in the Content Acquisition Program (CAP). CAP enables content providers to submit web content directly to Yahoo! for review and inclusion in the Yahoo! Search index; content providers that participate in CAP through the Search Submit program pay for these services.

Web Results: Web Results are the most relevant web pages found in response to your search query. Web Results are generated from the billions of web pages discovered, crawled, reviewed, submitted, or otherwise included in the Yahoo! Search index. More than 99% of web pages in the Yahoo! Search index are included for free through Yahoo!’s web crawl process.

So, how does this factor into YOUR campaign and rankings?

Are the organic listings for your keywords being taken over by CPC listings?

Do you think consumers need to know these are paid listings?