Imagine you are the marketing director of a large, respectable corporation. You’ve approved advertising on a few prominent billboards around the city. Then, while taking a restroom break at a shoddy gas station along the highway, you notice the ad you approved for billboards is now gracing the top of a urinal cake. Seems ridiculous, right? Unfortunately (and unbeknownst to many), a similar situation is playing out millions of times each day in search marketing.

For those not familiar with search syndication, here’s a quick rundown of what’s taking place. When advertisers choose to buy paid search ads on the major engines, they’re not only bidding for their ads to appear on the main SERPs, they’re bidding to have their ads displayed on thousands of other (usually poor) sites that feature a search box. This is a trick long used by the big players to augment their search volume and claim higher market shares. Do not confuse these syndication partners with contextual advertising or the “content network” as many refer to it. These are two entirely separate subjects.

Google has recognized that smart advertisers often prefer NOT to have their ads blasted across thousands of parked domains and spammy sites with no legitimate content. It’s no secret that conversion rates on these partner sites are typically much lower. Fortunately, they allow you to opt out of the syndication network altogether. Problem solved.

Why doesn’t Yahoo! give us this option? I get it. It’s a business decision. Allowing advertisers to easily opt out of these syndication networks would cost millions in the short term. Some estimates claim as much as 55% of Yahoo!’s paid search clicks come from the syndication partners. To their credit, I think this number is much lower now, but it’s definitely still a substantial percentage, a substantial percentage that the company cannot afford to lose right now. However, a longer term approach would consider the losses over time as advertisers shift budgets away from Yahoo! due to low traffic quality and a lack of transparency on this issue.

Yahoo! does allow blocking of individual domains. The problem is identifying them. Yahoo! certainly isn’t going to provide you with a list of domains in their syndication network. That would make it too easy. Fortunately, there are ways to identify them using site-side analytics tools (i.e. – Google Analytics). In a little over a month, I’ve been able to ID and block over 200 poor performing Yahoo! search partners for one client. This seems like a great solution until you reach the maximum number of blocked domains, which now stands at 500. Considering the short period of time required to surpass 200, a maximum of 500 seems hardly adequate.

Yahoo!’s domain blocking, their policy of discounting clicks from less relevant sources and providing credits for clicks they deem “invalid,” are definitely steps in the right direction, but their reluctance to allow opting out altogether continues to fuel my distaste.

Microsoft isn’t off the hook here. While their syndication network is MUCH more legitimate than Google or Yahoo!’s, they draw my ire by refusing to allow us any control over which sites search ads may appear on. The Bing user interface lacks the functionality to block individual domains. Granted, most of their sites (e.g. – Barrons.com, WSJ.com) yield quality traffic, but then there’s Facebook. For many advertisers, appearing on Facebook isn’t such a bad thing considering its popularity in today’s society. Seems like a great place to reach many target audiences, but certainly not others. One of my clients, a leader in their category, cringes at the thought of appearing on a site like Facebook and for good reason. We’ve observed a 100% bounce rate and average time on site of less than 1 second for all clicks coming from Facebook in the past 30 days for this particular client. Not good. And Microsoft refuses to do anything about it.

I keep hearing that the capability to opt out of syndication is on the roadmap for both Yahoo! & Bing, but that response is getting old. Are they hiring programmers fresh out of 3rd grade to cut costs in Redmond and Sunnyvale? I doubt it. So c’mon guys, you can do better than this.

Now that Microsoft & Yahoo! have finally consummated their courtship, a new chapter will undoubtedly be written in the search syndication saga. How this will play out remains to be seen. As of now, the plan is to integrate all search advertising on the Microsoft adCenter platform for management purposes. Does this mean no blocking capabilities? Will Microsoft, which has been a proponent of higher quality & limited syndication, allow the Yahoo! partner network to poison (strong word I know, but apt) their inventory? Let’s hope not…