Seems like Yahoo! is testing new search results with price comparison sites occupying the major share on SERPs. What’s more surprising is that 4 out of 10 Yahoo! Organic Search results found were sponsored results. The screenshot purports to show Yahoo! testing a new search results for product based queries.
While the entire SEO and Blog industry is busy discussing about bloggers and media pundits not classifying Paid Links/Posts as ‘Sponsored ’ & ‘No-Follow’ on their site/blog. Our big brother here slips through some of their sponsor results/sites into organic listing!
Shouldn’t Yahoo! be careful enough to point them as sponsored results for users. I am sure they were testing with few of their users but end users should be shown what organic and sponsor results are on SERP pages.
Looking into the screenshot, few more interesting points pop out.
- Yahoo!’s sister Price Comparison Site Kelkoo.co.uk is not found anywhere between the 4 result but still stays out as Sponsor Result.
- Yahoo!’s click through data from 1st result of a product query to see if people actually click-through those sites?
- Price Comparison sites dominating product based queries.
- All most all of these price comparison sites present in SERPs are sponsor results which could be analyzed from the click-through data.
Now, why did Yahoo! sneak these sponsor result inside their organic search results? Why not the let their user know the site are sponsored result (which they are about to click)?
You can also note Yahoo!’s click-through data collection from the 1st result (at SERP) to see if people actually click on a shopping website over a price comparison site?
Seems cheeky… what’s your take?
View: Yahoo! testing Sponsored Sites in Organic SERPs? (Screenshot / Orginal Size)
November 25th, 2008 at 6:34 pm
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