Paid inclusion and paid listings - Research paper

Section five - Paid inclusion and Paid listings

Business Information Review - Dec 03 - Search engine marketing

"So how can we trust what we're given?" Financial Times (5)

Paid inclusion involves a company paying a search engine for the right to submit its site, (or just selected pages) directly to the search engine's database so that the site (or pages) are available more quickly to searchers. Paid inclusion has been available since 2000, but it has only taken off in the last year. Advantages for advertisers are:

it removes the time-lag that occurs with free URL submissions, where there can be a significant gap of several weeks from the time the URL was first submitted to the search engine for indexing and it actually appearing in the database;
search engine spiders will return and re-index content on your site more frequently compared to web sites in the search index that have not paid for inclusion. For example, companies that pay to be included in Inktomi's directory (now owned by Yahoo) can choose to have their site crawled/re-indexed every 48 hours;
it is particularly useful for sites that contain a wide range of content that cannot be easily categorized into a few keywords;
it is easier to control budgets/costs with paid inclusion compared to paid listings.

According to www.morevisibility.com, typical costs for paid inclusion are between US$20 - US$40 per page included in the search engine database. (6)

Paid inclusion does not guarantee higher referrals for expenditure - it only guarantees prompt inclusion in the search engine database. Search engine algorithms do not distinguish between free and paid inclusions. Even so, sites that have paid for inclusion are not visually distinguished from those that haven't in search results. Search providers such as LookSmart and Inktomi also employ human editors to review and catalogue web pages submitted by companies paying to be included - this manual refining can ultimately favour sites that have paid for inclusion and may result in higher rankings compared to free editorial listings. This has lead some to question the integrity of such search engine results, and it is for this reason that Google does not offer paid inclusion.

Conversely, paid listings are clearly distinguished and operate on a cost-per-click basis so advertisers only pay for referrals and not exposure.

Paid listings are short text advertisements within search results screens, with links to the advertiser's site. Advertisers compete with one another by bidding to sponsor selected keywords.

Keyword sponsorship operates on a cost-per-click basis, so advertisers only pay for those visitors who have clicked on their listing to go to their Web site. Provided an advertiser has bid enough to sponsor a particular keyword, there is no cost for their listing to appear on the search results screen. However Google also has minimum click-through rates that need to be maintained for the ads to continue to appear in the listings. (Conversely, Google will boost an ad/listing that achieves a higher click through rate than other listings for the same sponsored term/keyword).

Next: Section six - How keyword sponsorship works