What's the deal with paid inclusion?

It used to be, new pages would not be in unless you paid. But now...

[notsosmart]

Now I have sites in MSN that I have never paid to include. And they all show up as much as those that I paid for. Is paying a waste of money? Or am I just lucky? What's the deal?

[tomsee]

Hi,

I paid Alta Vista $39 to index my website. Now I'm having second thoughts...

Maybe if they offer users an option to rank a site higher in a search result, it could've been an effective way for me to market my website.

I don't mind paying $39 for my main domain name and maybe a lower fee for the rest of my webpages. What do you think?

[notsosmart]

I have a different problem. I've paid thousands for pages to be indexed.

If I didn't have to, I'm pissed. If sites I am competing against in MSN didn't have to, I'm pissed.

I don't even bother with Alta anymore. Complete waste of money.

[Mohamed_E]

notsosmart,

I was hoping that someone more knowledgeable would answer your question, but since noone has let me take a stab at it.

Those who defend paying for inclusion in Ink make two points:

1. Paid inclusion will get you in immediately, free inclusion takes an unspecified amount of time.

2. Paid inclusion guarantees spidering every 48 hours, so you can make changes to your site and observe the effect on the SERPS within two days, this is almost "real time" compared to the free crawl cycle.

I have never paid for inclusion, but I think the above represents the case that several members here have made.