Playing the Game with Yahoo! Paid Inclusion

If your not familiar with Yahoo!'s paid inclusion program, it aims to help websites to get fully indexed and stay fresh in yahoo's search results. The million dollar question that many experts have raised is "does Yahoo!'s paid inclusion help website rankings?"

If you have had experience, I would certainly love to hear from you but I'll divulge mine. In several instances where I was able to verify that Yahoo had indexed my URL's in question before I used the program, I almost always have seen improvement. In some cases, a URL that wasn't listed in the top 30, all of a sudden was ranking #1 or #2. Just a coincidence? Perhaps not! But regardless of what I mention here, Yahoo! firmly disagrees that there is any correlation.

Recently I submitted a website with tracking URL's, therefore not the actual URL within the website's navigation. Within a day or two, I noticed that not only did the URL with the tracking URL appear, but also the one without the tracking. Moreover, typically the URL with the tracking was ranking lower than the natural one. My interest sparked a conversation with Yahoo!'s search submit express team.

They said that their experience has led them to believe that URL's with tracking do not perform as well. They also denied the fact that by using the program increases your chances for ranking higher. My question was why should there be a ranking difference then? They said that the URL's age in the index could be culprit. Well, I'm not totally buying into that, but their experience was also verified by mine. What to do? Should I use the tracking and verify sales and except lower performance? Or should I not use the tracking and accept higher rankings? My inclination is to still use the tracking, but I'm open for any opinions:)
[tags] yahoo paid inclusion, pay per click advertising, search engine marketing [/tags]