Yahoo kills off affiliates overnight by ending Paid Search Inclusion Programme

This news is almost a week old now, but I’ve not seen it appear much in affiliate circles as of yet.  Back on 15th October there was a post on Search Engine Land about Yahoo announcing the end of their Paid Search Inclusion programme.

For the unaware, Yahoo offered two products – Search Submit Basic, which charged an annual fee, and Search Submit Pro, a CPC based programme.  Whilst it’s been free for spiders to come and crawl sites for a long time these packages allowed you to be a lot more flexible about your Yahoo search – allowing you to change items such as the descriptions and also by paying a CPC allowed clients to increase their organic search listings.

There are also a few very large affiliates who have built their model around this method and worked with a number of large blue chip brands in the Affiliate market space; essentially replacing the clients organic Yahoo listings with their affiliate links but increasing their overall rankings for some competitive search terms on a CPA basis – one of them was apparently TD and CJ’s second largest UK affiliate and responsible for huge amounts of revenue / commission.

I’m sure that these companies will find other channels to utilise and after the Microsoft deal was announced it was inevitable that it would happen but whilst a bit old school it’s a shame to see this advertising method come to an end and I do wonder what effect it will have with some of the networks that they will have generated millions of pounds worth of sales with.