Last week, I took advantage of SMN’s Successful Feed-Based Search Marketing: Shopping Engines, Paid Inclusion & More Webinar. If you have a client who is considering shopping engine channels, direct them to this presentation. Chris Sherman does an effective job of explaining these subjects at a very high level.

I was fairly comfortable with most of the information that Chris offered. However, even four days later, I’m still stumped on why people are still choosing to use paid inclusion, specifically the bulk Search Submit Pro. Below are recommendations on who needs paid inclusion from Chris' presentation, followed my initial thoughts:

1. Content management of database-driven sites with search-unfriendly architecture

• Forget the 10%. Fix the site!!! How stubborn do you have to be to ignore 90% of market share?

2. Sites that require cookies or session IDs; sites with Flash content

• See #1

3. Sites with rapidly changing or seasonal content

• Proper use of XML sitemaps and 404 error pages should help keep inventory pages stocked. Remember, the paid inclusion means a crawl every 48–72 hours. That means it’s imperative that you evaluate how your business works, compared to what Yahoo will provide.

4. eCommerce sites with moderate to frequent inventory turnover

• See #3

5. Brands needing rapid response to negative feedback or events

• Again, effective use of XML sitemaps can help with this, but it’s better to use some reputation management tools.

6. Any site seeking rapid or regular feedback on organic optimization strategies

• I can’t really comment on this because I really don’t know what the “regular feedback” looks like. Chris was very upfront about Yahoo not giving away the special sauce, so I’m not sure how much value it really provides. If anyone has an example of what Yahoo sends as feedback, please let me know.

IMHO, paid inclusion is a band-aid for a much larger problem. Until Google decides to adopt a paid inclusion model (and I’m not holding my breath on that one), Yahoo’s paid inclusion will account for 9.87% of search engine market share. Now 10% is better than nothing; but remember that inclusion means indexing, not ranking. And I can’t imagine a situation where Yahoo’s Paid Inclusion would drive more revenue than aligning your site with general SEO best practices (which Chris also recommends).