Want a top listing

Related Topics:| E-biz Advice | Search Engine |

Want A Top Listing? Become A Content Partner!

From The Search Engine Report Aug. 5, 1997

You cannot buy a better search engine listing in the major search engines. None of the search engines will do this, in part because Open Text's experiment with it in mid-1996 produced terrible publicity. Listings have become like the editorial content of a newspaper. They are supposed to be independently produced and not influenced by an advertiser's wishes.

So what's an advertiser to do? Transform yourself into a "content" provider, and suddenly you legitimize receiving preferential treatment.

That's what Amazon.com has recently done with Excite and Yahoo. The online bookseller announced agreements on July 7 with both services to help ensure that those looking for books will be directed toward Amazon.com.

Over the coming years, when you search for a book in either service, you are going to be seeing links to related books listed within the Amazon.com web site. Amazon.com is also going to produce book-related content for Excite.

This is just one of the latest pseudo-editorial deals that have been announced recently. Ticketmaster and Excite announced a similar partnership in June. WebCrawler's new "Shortcuts" that debuted in June are also another way of transforming advertising content into what seems to be editorial content.

Would Amazon.com produce the book review for your local newspaper? It is not likely that is what book reviewers are supposed to be doing. Readers are depending on them to be impartial.

Deals like that announced by Amazon.com should be seen less as "content partnerships" or "new services" and more as advertising deals. That is not necessarily bad.

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