The Mixed Message Of Paid Inclusion

From Search Enigne Watch

[skibum]

On one hand, each search engine out there touts the freshness and relevancy of their search results to get the general public to use the engine and perceive it as a source that can provide relevant results to queries.

The general public might assume that each engine goes to great lengths to include as many sites/pages in the database as possible. Most of the time they don't state that the "freshest" content is from sites that have expressly paid to be in the database.

When it comes to selling the inclusion programs, the sales material essentially states that your content won't be refreshed very often, and could therefore go stale in, or be dropped from the database if you don't pay.

The pay per click engines may be the closest to having one story and being honest about it to all parties. (FindWhat, Overture, etc..)

Can or should engines like AV, Fast, Teoma, etc. be more up-front with advertisers and consumers about the reality of search enigne indexing?

Is there any way to get around this, besides adopting the Google model and not charging, while crawling as much of the web as possible?

[Google may actually have fresher results from company websites that they do not show in the DB - so as to avoid the appearance of providing paid anything]

[agerhart]

You raise some good points here.

I wouldn't want to generalize with this too much though, as there are some paid programs that work quite well for most people. Inktomi is a good example of this. Although some people have had problems, I think it is safe to say that the majority of people that have paid Inktomi have been happy with their spidering and refreshing (results are a different thread).

AV spiders websites like crazy, at a higher rate than most, but their update cycle is weak. I have not been impressed with their paid program, but this may also be a result of AV not being a huge source of traffic.

I have not personally used Fast's paid program, but I have not heard one bad thing about it.

I think that if search engines need to monetize, than these paid programs are not a bad way to go about it, from our standpoint as SEOs, and from their standpoint. We are assured that our pages will be spidered, indexed, and refreshed within a short period of time. We know when they will be refreshed, and we can make our changes and updates accordingly, which is gold from an SEO standpoint.

I agree with you that there should not be room for them to guarantee inclusion within 7 days and a 48 hour refresh, and not deliver. This is bad, bad business.

There are programs that work, and work well, so there are current solutions to the problems that exist. Find them......Fix them.