Meet The Crawlers
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The next seminar, and one I was particularly looking forward to, was the “Meet the Crawlers” session. Danny Sullivan (editor, searchenginewatch.com) moderated this session with the speakers Matt Cutts (Google) and Ron Verheijen from Yahoo!/Overture.

Ron started and talked about new features at Yahoo! As well as some interesting facts on how they choose descriptions. They are based on meta, directory or snippets depending what is deemed most relevant. They also have some useful new “shortcuts” such as ‘Weather’. Go to Yahoo.com and type in “weather your town” (without the quotations and of course your town not “your town”). I have just tried it for Hanover (Germany) and got…

Current weather in Hanover, Germany: 64° F
Mostly Cloudy - Expected High/Low: 69°/53°
View 5-Day Forecast for Hanover (link)

Now all they need to do is give the temperature in Celsius as well, hint hint . Matt should play American Football or Rugby as that was one fine body swerve he has there!

Second prize for the best no comment has to go to Ron Verheijen from Yahoo!/Overture. I was a bit naughty and put him on the spot about the new pay for inclusion / pay per click service for inclusion in Yahoo! Search and all other Yahoo! Search engines (AltaVista, MSN, Alltheweb) namely “site match”. My question was something like…

“Why did Yahoo! find it necessary to make pay per click (sponsored listings) compulsory on the site match submission program instead of splitting the program into two, a pay per click option and a pay for inclusion option. Bearing in mind that many small business wouldn’t be able to afford any form of ppc campaign and for many the 15 cent per click (minimum) does not compute into a reasonable ROI”

You could sense Ron squirming a little and then came the answer. “You can still submit freely to Yahoo! which does however provide no guarantee of being indexed…”
Not really answering the question, but a pretty good no comment, despite the answer being somewhat unsatisfactory in my opinion. I’d like to be able to offer clients pure pay for inclusion without being tied into pay per click. I know I’m not alone in the SEM services world in that either. I could see Matt enjoyed the question much more than Ron did

Alan
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What is a website without traffic?
ABAKUS Internet Marketing