What is Paid Inclusion and Can It Work For You?, Part 2

In our last article, we talked about the three types of paid inclusion.

Continuing on this topic, it is interesting to note that there are many search engines out there (such as Yahoo!) mix paid inclusion with Web crawling results. Google and Ask.com, however, do not allow paid inclusion in their search engine listings (ads are displayed separately).

What do those in favor of paid inclusion think? Well, they claim that using these services will help improve the relevancy of search engine results due to the indexing of pages formerly difficult to access. It also proves to be particularly useful for dynamic Web pages.

Those against paid inclusion cite the risk of only being able to achieve high rankings with payment, and therefore skewing search results so much as to make relevance ranking obsolete.

A big factor to consider is that paid inclusion may get you immediate listings—but there is no guarantee that it will put you in the top 10—or even in the top 100 results set. As algorithms change frequently, your place on a search results page still depends on how well your site is optimized.