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 LARGEST search engine database because it refused to adopt 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 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 websites on Net which cannot justify such a fee.

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

Today I got a call from a very good client who was excited to have me see his site redesign and sent me off to visit while he was on phone. I typed in domain name and watched page load in my browser. Nice color scheme, interesting scrolling header, clean design, good navigation. "Looks Good," I said, and then my heart sank when I noted that my carefully crafted title tag was missing from browser title bar.

I clicked to sitemap and noticed that my naming convention for pages, subdirectories and image files had been discarded like yesterdays trash. I went to source code and saw that all javascript we had neatly pulled off page and assigned to independent off-page .js files was back on page again, along with CSS styles. Oh, and no description metatags.

I began to groan audibly as I made each of these discoveries, forgetting that my client was on line. My heart leapt back into my throat as I looked for all great articles, press releases, additional text content I had conscientously added and found them missing from site entirely!

My client responded to my noises with an exclamation that his new site was "State of Art!" and "Completely Automated" as he pointed out cool new functions and slick scripts. "Only one problem," he said, still gushing about expensive toys, goodies and googaws on his pretty new baby - "We dropped from our first page rankings in search engines, what happened?"

I won't detail what I said as I exploded in anger at havoc his developer wreaked upon my lovingly optimized pages, but after I calmed a bit (thank goodness he's a good client and a friend) I detailed developer's unknowing destruction.