One of the last holdovers from a bygone era of search marketing is due to fold at the end of the year. Yahoo’s Search Submit program will be phased out by January of 2010.
Yahoo CFO Tim Morse, speaking to reporters last week on the company’s quarterly earnings conference call, said that "[w]e think this is a change to help us improve the overall health of our marketplace on an ongoing basis, so it helps us to do it," according to the Inquirer, an IT website.
Search submit and other paid inclusion programs have been widely criticized by many in the search engine optimization (SEO) industry, who say that search engines are presented to consumers as unbiased sources of information, and that accepting advertising in organic search results is an unethical blurring of the lines between advertisement and services.
Some companies, like Google, have avoided any similar programs, asserting that the practice "taints the value to searchers," according to digital marketing website ClickZ. Microsoft and Ask used to offer paid inclusion, but their programs were both discontinued in 2004.
