I’ll be honest. I thought paid inclusion for listings in search engines had gone away, and then one of my customers asked me for some advice about it.
It seems that they have been paying for Yahoo’s paid inclusion program for a substantial amount of time and were asking me about its uses and benefits.
My instant response as I would imagine most good SEO’s would be that paid inclusion really isn’t worth it. After all, paying for inclusion carries no guarantee of a particular placement in that index – so what are you paying for? After all, it’s not that difficult to get listed in any search engine – which is what you are paying for here – the tricky part is achieving a ranking. To get listed all you need are some credible links and a half decent website structure and you are away.
In the past search engines were harder to get listed in, in part because the crawl rate was slow. Also because of a slower crawl rate, it took longer for search engines to take account of the changes you had made to a site and re-determine the position on the SERP as a result of these changes. I’m certainly seeing now that the index is much "fresher" in all 3 of the major search engines as a result of more frequent crawling.
The historical benefits of paid inclusion was that you could get the search engine to take a look at the page on your terms, so that when you made changes you would file for re-inclusion and see if these changes had the desired effects.
I’m looking at the website of the company that provides this service and am somewhat baffled by some of the so-called advantages, they start by saying "Aside from the obvious advantage of appearing in the natural search results" – well this can be done quite easily without paying Yahoo an annual fee, I’ve worked on dozens of websites over the last 18 months – and all bar one was listed in Yahoo without paying them any money (and I know the reasons why that 1 didn’t – frustrating reasons but not things I could enc
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