Why Pay-Per-Inclusion Search Engines are Dying

A Pay-Per-Inclusion search engine is a service in which a search engine charges you a certain amount to spider and include your website in its database. For this fee, regular repeated spiderings are guaranteed, so you are sure to be indexed.

However, rankings are not guaranteed. These pages have no advantage over any page submitted for free. A few years ago, pay-per-inclusion search engines such as Inktomi, Altavista, Ask Jeeves and Yahoo were introduced. However, they have failed badly and have lost traffic to Google.

Why Google is Tops

Google built the LARGEST search engine database because it refused to adopt the pay-per-inclusion model. By allowing every website to submit its pages free, it built an enormous database of websites. Good news for everyone searching Google's database!

Google's competitors were unable to deliver the same results, partly because they had fewer websites to choose from. If you charge for entry into a search engine, you eliminate over 90% of the websites on the Net which cannot justify such a fee.

What the pay-per-inclusion search engines did not understand was that their real customers were the ADVERTISERS and not the searchers. Nor were the websites the customers of the engines.

The advertisers pay the search engines, so they are the customers. Google recognised this and decided to keep the advertisers happy by providing a large database of websites. This large database became well known and it attracted great numbers of searches. These searches were exposed to the advertisers' products and the searches led to good sales. To make this most efficient, search engine submission must be free.

Search Engine Model is Similar to Television

This is all similar to television where programmes are made for the masses and given away free. Then the advertisers step in and make the money! As a search engine survives by the quality of its search results, surfers and sites flocked to Google making it the number one search engine.

Why the Death of Pay-Per-Inclusion SE's is Good for Small Sites

Only large quality SE databases can fulfil the needs of surfers. Your relationships with the search engines is one of mutual benefit. You need the traffic and the search engines provide the quality content.

Therefore by creating good websites with quality content and submitting them free to the search engines, you are both winning. There is no need to spend enormous amounts on search engine submission and optimisation. All you need to do is create good websites with the appropriate keywords for your pages and everything else will take care of itself.

Of course, this is where we were at the beginning of the Internet revolution, except certain search engines got too greedy and thought they could cash in on unfortunate small website owners!

© John Lynch

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