Why pay for inclusion, they're all finding me for free

Am I missing something?

[Jimmie]

I'm confused about paying search engines for inclusion. I've been online for 2 months and I find my site in all the pay-for-inclusion search engines I've checked. Often as #1 or #2 for main keywords. Others I assume haven't crawled me deep enough, but I think like with the others, I will eventually move up in them too, since that's the pattern I saw with others. Is this anybody else's experience: That if you work very hard getting links from all over and wait, you'll eventually be found and included no matter what?

[tigger]

I've found if you build the links eventually most of the PFI Se's will find your site, I think the only real advantage of paying for a page is the guarantee that the page will get crawled every 48hrs which does help if you are trying to get a competitive term into the rankings

[mansterfred]

IMO I do not think some of the engines crawl as deep unless you pay for the extra pages.I noticed much better results after I listed 12 pages in INK & Teoma. Google seems to be the only really deep "free" crawler.

[Jimmie]

This is gonna sound so dumb...what is the address to search inktomi, that's the one search engine I haven't checked...but inktomi.com doesn't get me there.

[coconutz]

[search.positiontech.com...]

Where to query Inktomi results? [webmasterworld.com]

[kevinpate]

I dunno ... I've never done any PFI on a NFP's informational site, and INK is all over it, often grabbing new content pages within 8-16 hours of putting them online.
INK's actually coming around so much I'm wondering about limiting the crawl somewhat. Google comes more and more ach month. Scooter, well, Scooter still stops by, but Scooter ain't given the site much of a ride in a while. Who knows, maybe the wheels are a tad rusty or somethin.

[HuhuFruFru]

yes Jimmie, i agree, this is so true. paying for inclusion is a mistake for webmasters who take their time in getting good links, the PFI SE's will find you after some time and include you. PFI is good for rich webmasters who don't have the time to exchange links or are in a hurry for getting included.

[cornwall]

I am with the others that say you do not need to pay for inclusion, unless you are in a tearing hurry.

Recently I found that the PFIs found new sites even if they were not on DMOZ. I had always thought until now that Dmoz was necessary to get onto the PFIs, and was pleasantly surprised to find that even while languishing in the unreviewed queue at DMOZ, a site could still get included elsewhere

[Jimmie]

thanks, coconutz....and yep, I'm on the first page of Inktomi, too...didn't pay. I guess like was said here, PFI's are for rich webmasters who don't want to work so hard...but I wonder how that works for google...do they pick up others as well who paid for inclusion in other engines but did not work hard for link exchanges? Or is google primarily focused on link exchanges, content, and whatever else their formula includes, for SERP's?

[new_shoes]

My experiences are a bit different.

I now rank #2 on ink for the most important keyword, and I never paid. My site is over 50,000 pages, but only 40 of those are indexed. My site's been online since 96, and the position seems very stable. Links are clean and clear, but ink never went deeper than the 40 pages.

A few things worth mentioning:

- The site changed name 4 years ago, but ink never updated the name. Even though it obviously has fresh _content_ which shows in the results, the title is still the old site name.
- I released a foreign language version of the site recently, and never added the url, and ink crawled more than 250 pages.

Can anyone tell me how I get the rest, the over 49,000 pages indexed? - preferebly without paying.

If I paid to to have 5-10 pages indexed, would this make inktomi go deeper?