Is one of the ranking factors in Yahoo’s new paid search platform (dubbed ‘Panama’) going to be how well the site ranks organically?

 Loren Baker over at Search Engine Journal seems to think so:

Yahoo Search Marketing’s ‘Quality Ranking’ could look at these factors as being the most important:

* Bid or Click Price
* Historical click-through data
* Conversion data
* Organic Rankings of the said Advertiser URL
* Whether the query word/phrase appears in the title
* Keyword in URL
* Keywords on Landing Page
* Possibly other Keyphrases in Campaign
* Comparison between other sites advertising for key term
             FPF added the bold for emphases.

Loren bases this list on a Yahoo patent application from last spring titled: Matching and ranking of sponsored search listings incorporating web search technology and web content

Here is one of the major flaws I see in this being a paid ranking factor: Anyone who is serious about their PPC campaigns are not going to be sending paid traffic to the same URL that they send organic traffic to. They send them to specialized landing pages, often with quite complicated tracking URLs. These “URLs” are not going to rank well - IF they are even indexed in the first place. Could it be that they base this on how well the “domain” ranks for the term? Well, that’s another story…

Wouldn’t it be interesting to see PPC-only search marketing companies hiring SEOs to help them get better organic rankings for clients with low quality scores?