Dr. Jerry R. Perrich

Editor's Note - 12/4/2001 Welcome friends. The Analyst Software newsletter brings you hard-hitting articles with key information you can use for online success. Some articles are controversial, some aren't, but all are focused on helping you succeed online. I encourage your feedback to the authors of our articles (copy me if you like too). When an article stimulates a lot of feedback, we will do a follow-up article with your opinions. We solicit articles from the experts who are out there succeeding online everyday. If you are interested in having your articles published, contact me. Enjoy. Dr. Jerry R. Perrich Editor editor@analystsoftware.com

Paid Inclusion Search Engines — What Gives?

As little as 16 months ago you could launch a new web site and submit it to all the search engines and directories for free. There might be a bit of a wait (3 months and more) to be indexed by some engines, but at least it was free.

Those days are gone. Today you can easily pay more than $1000 to have your web site included in key search engines. Plus, some of those fees are annual or semi-annual.

What happened?

Simple economics. The search engines have learned that investors expect a return on their money. Investors won't pay for operating expenses indefinitely.

Since the original business model for most engines, advertising, hasn't worked out very well, they are looking for alternative means to generate revenues. That has given rise to two new business models – Paid Inclusion and Pay Per Click. The former is the focus of this article, while the latter is for another time.

The Paid Inclusion model includes a fee for web sites who wish to be included in the search engine. Yahoo was the first to implement this model – in the fall of 2000 – with a $199 fee for all commercial and business sites. Coincidentally, their acceptance of web sites for inclusion in their directory was reputed to increase from 25% to 100%.

Since then several other engines have joined the Paid Inclusion model, and there have already been price increases from the original fees. Here is the current breakdown:

• Yahoo – $299 one time fee for your entire web site.
• Looksmart – $299 one time for your entire web site.
• Inktomi (the database behind many engines) – $39 for the first URL and $25 for subsequent URLs (that means each page you submit it charged the fee). Annual fee.
• AltaVista – $39 for the first URL and $24 (and less depending on quantity) for subsequent URLs (yes each page again). Semi-annual fee.
• AlltheWeb – to be implemented this month.
• Google – rumors that they will begin charging fees in 1Q02.

So even a 10 page web site (assuming you wanted all 10 pages indexed) would cost you $1117 for the current 4 Pay For Inclusion engines and $774 a year thereafter. Not a small sum indeed. (Note – this amount would be reduced if you didn't submit to AltaVista. Some experts predict that AltaVista is not long for this world and your money could be lost. Does anyone remember NBCi? Wouldn't you have regretted paying the NBCi fee one day and finding they folded up the next?)

But there are advantages too. For example, by paying the fee you are guaranteed that your web site will be included in these engines/directories. This sure beats waiting 3 months to find out your site was not indexed and having to submit again. Also, the links from Yahoo and Looksmart are important for link popularity in search engine optimization.

Bottom line?

Paid Inclusion is here to stay, and you can expect other engines to follow suit. I imagine a year from now there will be very few if any major engines that do not collect fees in some way from web sites.

What major impacts?

Well, a logical result is that some web sites will not pay or be able to pay for Paid Inclusion engines. Thus, they will not be indexed in those engines. Therefore, the databases for Paid Inclusion search engines will be lacking in many web pages that may be excellent pages.

This is particularly interesting as the point of search engines is to return relevant results to searchers, i.e. web pages that closely match the search terms. Because the owners of some web sites will not pay the inclusion fee, they will be left out. Thus, the relevancy "algorithm" for Paid Inclusion search engines carries a caveat of "closely matches the search term AND willing to pay a fee".

Another impact is the encouragement of an existing trend - ROI (return on investment) Internet marketing. For a long time it has blithely been assumed that high rankings in search engines produced prodigious amounts of traffic. And the corollary is that all that traffic to your web site will make your web site a phenomenal success.

With the Paid Inclusion fees on top of the costs for search engine optimization, web site managers will be stimulated to look closely at how the ROI for search engine optimization stacks up against other means to generate traffic for their web sites.

That's what I think. What do you think the impact of Paid Inclusion is? Email me with your thoughts and we will do a follow-up in a future article.

About the author:
Dr. Jerry R. Perrich is editor of the Analyst Software newsletter and Director of the Internet Marketing Institute. He specializes in online marketing.