Yahoo's paid inclusion within their organic search engine results, also known as Yahoo Search Submit Pro or YSSP if you are into jargon, will be retired at the end of the year. For many online direct response online retailers, the YSSP program was a great performer. It is no secret that the organic algorithms between Google and Yahoo varied greatly, leaving SEO's with the ultimate question: Optimize for Google or Yahoo? For all SEO's that I know, this was an easy answer. Optimize to Google's high volume and let the paid marketers buy Yahoo paid inclusions. Win... Win...
 The YSSP out-performed most paid campaigns in terms of ROI, as it was seen by most as an organic result. So why then are they saying farewell to their old friend? This is of coarse due to the new Yahoo! / MSN (Bing) partnership. After January 1, Yahoo! will begin serving Microsoft's Bing search engine results. Those sites that are not indexable or crawlable will no longer be able to rank on the first page of Yahoo organic listings. An increasing factor in the value of this is also the incrimental increase in Bing funneled results. With Yahoo!, MSN, and Bing and serving the same results, SEO's will, for the first time, find it worth while to optimise to a non-Google algorithm. It is not to say that steps will be taken to enhance a landing page or site in a way that would detract from Google SERPs, but more likely emphasis will be made to utilize optimization strategies that will improve SERPs cross-channels. The SEO in me is definately excited about this new challange and the new learnings that can be made by SEOing for a semantic search algorithm like Bing. However, the SEMer in me will definately miss the old days of high ROI from this once successful paid channel. Farewell old friend YSSP... Thanks for all of the revenue you have brought me.
