walkman - 2:22 am on Mar 16, 2004 (gmt 0)

"As the resident philosopher here, I must respectfully point out that may not be true. There is evidence to suggest that getting high PR inbound links may make Googlebot crawl your site more deeply than if you don't have them. Thus, if I have a huge site, and buying a link on a PR7 page gets my site crawled fully, I am indeed paying for inclusion. Of course it is not Google I am paying; it is another webmaster. However, the net effect is the same."

True, but you CHOOSE to pay or choose to have a site that really sucks. Links will help you on all of above, but if you have decent site and link deep, Google will find, and index it. If you have a larger site, chances are that a few other people will link to you too. Also, that site was not built in a day (unless you have a ODP dupe) so Google will index it as you add more and more.

Let's say paying for a link helps it helps, but it's not PFI. Link to the main categories and Google will follow. Also, you can have that site link to you because they like your site, not just because you paid them.

I'm just talking about inclusions (PFI)...a PR7 helps on serps too...