• by Shankar Gupta , August 1, 2005

Search marketing company BeyondROI is expected this week to announce the release of a new technology product to facilitate the process of placing links in paid inclusion programs offered by Yahoo! and some other search engines. The service allows site owners to have feeds automatically set up to crawl their product and service Web pages, construct XML feeds, and then return those feeds to Yahoo! or other search engines for use in their paid inclusion programs.

The program, which utilizes crawlers and keyword mining algorithms, requires only the top-level domain name of a given site. With the domain name, the crawlers index every page on the site, filter out non-product and services pages, and create a set of XML files with page titles, keywords, and descriptions, which can then be delivered to Yahoo! for use in its paid inclusion service. The product will be released this week to all BeyondROI's clients, but has been used by the company's largest clients for the last three months.

In paid inclusion, companies pay Yahoo! for guaranteed inclusion into their natural search results. The location of their placement, however, is not specified. If a company's page doesn't do well with Yahoo!'s algorithm, they could end up buried far from the top in the natural search results.

BeyondROI isn't the only company to offer such a service. Rival iCrossing, for instance, also offers a similar feed service that delivers XML feeds to Yahoo! for paid inclusion, and received the licensing to do so in the first quarter of this year.

BeyondROI Chief Technology Officer John Haney said that none of the listings for BeyondROI's clients who use the feed service have so far appeared after the second page of results.

Yahoo! rival Google offers a similar XML-based indexing service called Google Sitemaps, but does not offer paid inclusion. Instead, companies are invited to submit sitemaps, but are not guaranteed placement in the paid rankings.