Paid Inclusions - A Boon or a Bane?

This article defines Paid inclusions and other forms of paid listings. It further briefly talks about paid inclusion, its advantages and over natural listings. Here we have also tried to analyse when paid listing would be useful and when natural listings would be enough.

Yahoo popularized ‘Paid Inclusion’, when they came up with the idea of listing sites immediately upon submission. Site owners can now use this to by pass the long queue that moved rather slowly if they wish to and have the resources to do so. Some other search engines were already in this league and several others leaped in to this; but Google, the grand master, conspicuously stayed out of this. While Yahoo continues with the paid inclusion and Google continues to ignore it, the web world is busy arguing and investigating the many advantages and disadvantages of such a listing.

Paid Inclusion – What it is?

Paid inclusion is a form of paid listing, different from paid rankings and pay per click campaigns.

Paid Inclusion is defined as a search engine marketing model in which the web site owners pay the search engine company an annual fee to guarantee their sites inclusion so that they will show up in the search results.

Paid ranking is defined as the model in which the web site owners can purchase key words for a particular cost so that he obtains No. 1 ranking for those words. Pay Per Click campaign is defined as the model in which the web site owner writes an ad and sets a bid for each keyword. He pays what he has bid for only when he receives a click on his ad for the keyword.

Paid inclusion means, paying an annual fee to the engine to be assured of a listing in their site. It is also called rapid listing since your site will be listed soon as you submit it. Most of the pre-requisites, though not all, that apply for submission of your site to engines for free, apply for paid inclusions also.

Paid inclusion does not mean that your site would be ranked on No 1 for the keywords you optimize your site for (that is paid rankings where you purchase keywords and get the top position for them.)

Benefits of Paid Inclusions

Paid inclusions have many benefits to offer:

• You are assured of immediate listings on the engine by paying a fee, which is usually paid annually. This means that you don’t have to wait in the long queue of web sites waiting to be listed. The wait could be reduced from several months to several days.
• Your site would remain listed on the engine as long as your annual account with them is active. This is a great advantage especially with the current state of unpredictability that persists in today’s spider world.
• Another unique advantage of paid inclusion is that most of the spiders of these engines would crawl the site more frequently (in some cases as frequently as once a day) than they would otherwise. This gives the paid includes an opportunity to improve their ranking, because, any updates on the site is caught and listed more frequently.

Drawbacks of Paid Inclusions

Paid inclusions have their share of weaknesses:

• The obvious disadvantage of paid inclusions is the cost you pay for being listed. It varies with different search engines; you may usually pay anywhere between $100 and $200 annually.
• Paid inclusions have a lesser reach than free listings mainly because not all the engines, including the major traffic driver – Google, offer such a service.
• A main disadvantage is the negative connotation that many people associate with paid inclusions. They do not trust the sites getting entry through paid inclusion and they denounce the sites that opt for these services.

Paid Vs Natural Listings – the Choice

Deciding whether to get your site listed naturally or through paid inclusions could be quite confusing. And the choice would be different depending on the chooser’s needs and resources.

Circumstances where natural listings would be good for you

• If you site is already listed with the engine. In this case, you would be better off concentrating your resources on improving your rankings, as paid inclusion may not offer any great advantage to you.
• If your target audience is general audience and your business has low revenue per order rate. Paid inclusions are not going to benefit you, as the main source of traffic- Google does not offer it. The traffic other engines generate may not suffice your needs. In this case you could resort to other forms of paid inclusions such as Pay-Per-Clicks.

Circumstances where paid inclusions would be a boon

• When you want your new, unlisted site to be indexed rapidly.
• When you have a large business with high revenue per order rate. In such a case a small but targeted traffic of specific quality is what you want. Paid inclusion could help you get that.
• When you have pages that are generated dynamically, it might be difficult to get them listed regularly. Paid inclusions can come to your rescue here, as the engine would surely list these pages.
• When the content and structure of your site is frequently updated, you want the spider to crawl through and catch up with them more often than a regular spider would. Paid inclusions can address this need.

Having seen and read so much, it may be a wee bit simpler to decide if your web site could make use of the services of Paid inclusion or not. But if the debate is on which of the two, paid inclusion or natural listing, is better, we would say, the argument continues…

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