Yahoo! Search Submit Program (SSP) is Dead! October 16, 2009
Posted by learnseofree in Yahoo! SEO.trackback
Run out and tell all of your friends that the Yahoo! Search Submit Program (SSP) will cease to be by year end. The program has always been controversial to say the least since it was first conceived.
This little known paid inclusion program commonly known at Yahoo! as SSP has been available for years. When it first came out Yahoo! sold it as a way for companies to boost their organic rankings at Yahoo! for certain keywords if they were willing to pay to be included in the program. This could be done through a yearly subscription model (Search Submit Basic service) or pay-per-click model (Search Submit Pro service). But for many web sites, the boost in rankings and ROI were worth the advertising costs.
Basically, with SSP participants could specify a list of keywords for which they were willing to pay to receive good rankings. For each keyword they could specify a custom title and snippet to show in the SERPs and up to 3 addition URLs that would show as links under the organic listing.
The program was later said to NOT boost rankings since it was seen as sort of a conflict of interest. But it has been proven time and again that participating actually does help organic rankings for the subscriber at least for those keywords they request.
Anyway, good or bad… the Yahoo! Search Submit Program is about to be officially retired. I’m sure this is in large part because of the announcement that Bing will one day soon be powering Yahoo! search results.
