Penalized for not paying?

paid inclusion

[mktman]

How many pro seoizers agree with this statement?

"While most search engines still have a free-submit option, only Google does not penalize sites that are submitted without payment. This is an effort to find successful revenue models after the Dot-Bomb bubble burst."

As found in an pro seoizer webpage. Penalize? Is this too strong of a word?

[sem4u]

Penalize? Is this too strong of a word?

In my experience, yes. I have many pages that I have never paid to be indexed which do very well.

[martinibuster]

Too strong. All you have to do is get some strong links into you and they'll find you. Ink is good for that. But things could change once the Yahink changeover goes through. AltaVista is a fast indexer.

Ask Jeeves moves at a glacial speed, which means that at any given time their index must represent a snapshot of the web that's been stale for months. Some folks say you'll have better luck if you have a dmoz listing- I'm measuring this right now, so I can't confirm it yet.

<standard disclaimer>dmoz doesn't exist to feed sites to AJ</standard disclaimer>

[George]

Nonsense

[jady]

Nahh - never paid a dime on any of the SE's and do well on all - not much traffic but that because people dont use Lycos and Alta Vista much anymore, but rank in top 3 for all our keywords.

[mikeD]

It definitely applies for fast, I used webwurld once for annual paid 48 hr submission. Cancelled it last year and my site only has one page in fast now. This is a site with 4000+ pages and Google pr of 7.

[antrat]

I doubt it, in most other SE you can simply buy top spot and appear like you are relevant. No so with Google!

[Powdork]

Mysite.com bounced back and forth in inktomi from #1 to nowhere until I paid. Don't know if its related though.

<added>same with Google, except there's no payment option;)</added>