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Garnets March 2004 Comments On Paid Inclusion ProgramsGarnets March 2004 Comments On Paid Inclusion Programs
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Subjects > Computers > Internet > Web > Website Promotion
March 10, 2004 I just came across the article "Paying for Listing with Search Results". (Boston.com www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2004/03/08/paying_for_listing_with_search_results/ article by Hiawatha Bray, 3/8/2004.) It had some very interesting comments about search engine paid inclusion programs. Here is my summary of the main points of the article:
What follows are my thoughts about the article, and also 10 years of being in the search engine and directory development business:
Yahoo's "pay hundreds of dollars for us to pretend to think about maybe considering adding your site to our directory" system has always confounded me. LookSmart?Create has a similar system of charging over $100 to be "considered" for listing in their directory. I've never advised a client to pay for this. It's like a very expensive lottery ticket! Basically, despite the fact that you pay them $299, (recently it was changed to be required every year!), they disclaim every reasonable expectation you might have regarding what this might buy you. If they don't list you, you don't get your money back.
Paying for a search engine submission is essentially buying advertising. I don't know where they get their no refund idea from, I can't think of any real world location that charges so much, and forces me to agree that they don't have to give me my money back if for some reason they decide not to display my advertising. (Oh wait, I just realized where they get this from! They are emulating the government who can charge hundreds of dollars for permit processes to dole out permissions, where they can also have the audacity to just say "no". But most government agencies don't even have the cahoonies to charge $300 for a very simple application, at least most government agencies make a pretense of making the application seem really complicated if they are going to charge that much. But I digress!)
If Yahoo decides not to list you, are their editorial "review" comments worth $299, or do they just not respond at all? In my opinion, if they say no to a listing after someone pays that fee, they better be giving me a report that looks like someone spent at least a whole day reviewing my site, and telling me exactly what to change in my site so that I could resubmit it again for free, or I'm going to waste hundreds of dollars of my time trying to give them grief over stealing my money for doing what looks like nothing more than spending 5 minutes to say "No!"
Additionally, since their program only lists your home page, subsections of your site that are about other topics won't be listed. I believe you'd need to pay this fee for each of them....
There is another program where you can pay $20 or $30 per URL to be listed in a search engine index, with the fee for each additional URL decreasing slightly. (I believe this is AltaVista?Create's program.) It is possibly not much better. The big missing factor to decide if that is worth it or not: How much traffic is this search engine (Altavista) getting these days? AltaVista?Create used to be the king of search, and they used to deliver to me over 40,000 clickthroughs a day, to just one of my sites. That was when they just spidered the whole net for free.... But these days, if they get no where near the same amount of incoming traffic, no where near as many people doing real searchs, then they are not going to generate anywhere near as much traffic. For $20 per URL, I'd want to see at least 1000 clickthroughs, (especially if I'm only netting $2 gross profit per hundred visitors) or it probably isn't worth it.
If I thought I could get away with it, I'd quickly register a new domain name, "all-the-traffic-you-could-dream-of-getting.com" and charge people just 10% of what AltaVista?Create or Yahoo charges. Would $2 per year , per URL, or $29 for your home page, to be listed in a brand new full text search engine be worth it? Maybe, but I wouldn't personally risk $200 just to get 100 pages listed, unless I knew they were getting substantial amounts of traffic to the directory.
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