Yes. It is true… Yahoo! has announced plans to drop their Search Submit Program (SSP) offering at the end of the year. For those who do not know what SSP is, it is the Yahoo! paid inclusion program which allows companies to pay Yahoo! to alter their organic search rankings.
Instead of a normal SERP listing, a company can pay to have additional links in their organic listing (similar to sitelinks at Google). The company can subscribe by paying a yearly fee (Search Submit Basic) or pay-per-click fees (Search Submit Pro) for this service.
Below you can see an example of an SSP listing for the search for carnival cruises. Scroll down to find the www.carnivalcruises.com listing around position #3. It should appear similar to the image below:
Note the title does not match that of their home page. The snippet does not match the meta description of their home page. Also note the 3 “Quick Links:” beneath the snippet and their corresponding URLs. They get redirected through a Yahoo! URL so that they can track the number of clicks.
How does the SSP program work?
SSP works like this. With the Search Submit Pro offering a participating company can specify for which keyword phrases they want the additional links to appear. They can specify that when one of their URLs appears in the SERPs as a result for one of the specified keyword phrases that a custom title and snippet handcrafted by the participating company be shown in the SERPs. The company can specify 3 additional links to other pages on their site (landing pages typically) that will appear beneath the snippet. The company picks the link text and the URLs to display for the 3 additional links.
All of this data (keyword phrases, custom title, custom snippet, 3 additional URLs, link text from 3 additional URLs, etc.) used to be placed in a feed and uploaded directly to Yahoo!, however they have been outsourcing the setup to outrider.com lately.
SSP altered rankings to favor Yahoo! revenue generating SSP URLs
The sad part is that the SSP program drastically alters the organic search results. In other words, if you participate in the paid inclusion program, your URLs receive priority in their organic rankings. Did you hear that? Your URLs are ranked much higher for the keyword phrases that you are targeting with SSP than they would be if you were not participating. Yes. This is one case where you can literally buy your way to the top of the organic search results.
A company I work for has participated in SSP for many years (almost since its inception) and has ranked on page one (typically position #1) for many very competitive keyword phrases in their very competitive vertical. A while back they let their SSP contract expire. On the very day that the SSP contract expired, their URLs which had ranked #1 for years suddenly dropped to the mid-twenties, thirties, and forties.
At the time we were not sure if it was due to a coincidental change in Yahoo’s algorithm or if it was the fact that they were no longer participating in SSP. So we let it ride for about 3-4 months to see if rankings would recover. They didn’t. Months later on the very day that they renewed their SSP contract, their rankings shot back up to #1.
However, over the last couple of months I’ve noticed that SSP URLs are no longer getting quite the boost they were before. Over the last few months overall rankings for SSP URLs seem to be slowly dropping. Perhaps this was in preparation for the day that that SSP will not exist.
Bye-Bye SSP!
I recently asked some of the Yahoo! paid advertising sales staff and account managers how Yahoo! was going to handle SSP once they began using Bing to power their organic search results. I figured that Microsoft would not be too keen on modifying their ranking algorithm to appease Yahoo! SSP subscribers. They responded that they really didn’t know how they would handle it. I guess we have their answer… They are not!