17 replies to this topic

[madisonsdad]

I was just brought on board to manage SEM/SEO work for a company with a number of different web site. Non of these sites have been optimized at the present time. We are currently in the process of creating new sites to replace these old ones, but they won't be live until sometime next year.

In the meantime, I was approached by a company that claims they can get us good results with paid inclusion even though our websites are not optimized, and for the most part, have a fairly low page-rank. Does this sound like it is possible, or is he just giving me a sales pitch?

[qwerty]

Paid inclusion programs get your pages indexed. They don't get them ranked, so if the pages aren't optimized, it's not going to help much. The one advantage I know of with paid inclusion is that you can be sure the page will be spidered and the changes you make will be picked up, so you can quickly see (or at least have reason to believe) whether a change you've made has helped.

And by the way, PageRank really hasn't got much of anything to do with this. If a page is optimized well and it's not in a terribly competitive space, its PR isn't what's going to make or break its ranking.

[Bri]

Paid inclusion programs get your pages indexed.

So how different is this from submitting your pages to the SE's on your own. Won't that have the same effect?

[Craig B]

I find that paid inclusion does help rankings as there are a couple of extra fields that paid inclusion optimizers can tweak. For example, the number of incoming links is not a factor using paid inclusion so this value is estimated.

Bri, you can submit the pages on your own but some sites have 100,000+ pages!

Craig

[SearchRank]

What they probably will do is to submit pages "they" have created & optimized as well as "own" and then charge you for click-thru traffic. When you decide to stop paying them one day, the pages disappear. Wouldn't make much sense for them to do anything else.

My advice: Don't touch them with a ten foot pole. Instead work to optimize your own sites and pages within the sites. If your navigation is set up properly as well, you do not need to do any inclusion.

Besides, Yahoo is the only search engine that has an inclusion program anyway. How is their inclusion going to help you in Google, MSN and Ask Jeeves?

[Trellian]

Paid inclusion programs get your pages indexed. They don't get them ranked

Well that 's not true for all.

The catch here is to 1st identify what type of paid inclusion we are talking about.

1. Yahoo Search Submit Express program, which gets your pages indexed, not ranked,
OR
2. Yahoo Search Submit Pro program, which gets your pages indexed plus gives a boost in rankings as the XML feeds submitted to Yahoo need to be optimized otherwise they will be rejected by Yahoo. The sheer fact that the XML feeds need to be optimized generally provides good results from the Yahoo network of sites. So if they say they can provide good results from paid inclusion and this is what they are referring to then yes this is more than likely correct.

But if they are not talking about this program, then they be referring to a PPC campaign.

In eithercase start asking them more detailed questions.

Cheers
David

[Quadrille]

A good site map, plus a Google sitemap, and good internal navigation are really all you need to get indexed ... plus, of course, a couple of directory entries to help the SEs find your site.

It's easy to dress these services up and wrap them in marketing jargon, but getting indexed is as simple as it comes. It's usually the wrapping that you are paying for; indexing is what SEs do. For free.

If they are offering 'other services', first, be sure it's not a cop in disguise, then ask what, exactly, they mean.

Either way, it will no substitute for optimizing your site. And IF it gets your site listed a few days sooner than you could achieve yourself, will that justify the cash? (And it's a big IF).

[madisonsdad]

Yahoo Search Submit Pro program, which gets your pages indexed plus gives a boost in rankings as the XML feeds submitted to Yahoo need to be optimized otherwise they will be rejected by Yahoo. The sheer fact that the XML feeds need to be optimized generally provides good results from the Yahoo network of sites. So if they say they can provide good results from paid inclusion and this is what they are referring to then yes this is more than likely correct.

Can optimizing the XML feed give a page good rankings even if the .html is not optimized or does it just enhance an already optimized page?

[Quadrille]

Because it 'forces' you to optimize a part of your offereing, there may be some (small) advantage.

But small is the key word; there really is no shortcut to site optimization, and anyone who claims otherwise - especially anyone who is selling a service! - is either a fool ... or worse.

If Yahoo demands you start the process before accepting you, then that's a plus, but services that claim to spare you optimization tend to be those that work largely with 'off site' measures that only work while you pay - then they help a competitor.

And many 'off site' "techniques" are decreasingly effective and increasingly risky.

[Jill]

Can optimizing the XML feed give a page good rankings even if the .html is not optimized or does it just enhance an already optimized page?

Absolutely. With XML trusted feeds it doesn't matter what's actually on your page, as only the info that you provide in the feed is what is indexed.

Basically, it's like cloaking, only the search engine approves it because you are paying them for every click.

[Trellian]

Because it 'forces' you to optimize a part of your offereing, there may be some (small) advantage.

But small is the key word; there really is no shortcut to site optimization, and anyone who claims otherwise - especially anyone who is selling a service! - is either a fool ... or worse.

The advantage is not small, it can be huge.

There 3 main reasons why it does give a boost:
1. you need to optimize the feed to be accepted - it makes you do the work for all pages, not just for some

2. the more important part is that you submit only the content you want indexed on the page... you can strip out all the junk from every page that deflates the keyword densities for your top terms

3. you can "stuff keywords" into the page body where anywhere else that would be considered as spam.

Jill is right, this is legal cloaking, which can generate huge increases in traffic for keywords that are not even in the HTML but are relevant to the page.

Cheers
David

[dubert]

There is another reason why you may want to pursue paid inclusion.

As background,I am responsible for SEO at a large consumer brand in the Home Interiors industry, and we are going to start Yahoo's Search Select paid inclusion program next month

Our site has always ranked great on Google for industry keywords and phrases (top 4 for the most popular keyword), and we now have a top 10 ranking on MSN for many of the same keywords.

But ever since Yahoo dropped Google's organic results a while back, we do not seem to be on their radar screen - even when a user searches our brand name in the same phrase with the our product type. We have taken numerous steps to make our site spider friendly (site map, no meta redirects, no excess parameters, etc.), but we have had no luck.

In several instances we have made changes we hoped would remedy this situation and then tried to be patient and let the spiders do their thing; however, since we have also been engaging in PPC campaigns with click rates often more than double the $0.30 charged for the "organic" click throughs, it seems silly to keep waiting and leave those clicks "on the table" while we pay more for them elsewhere.

The simple economics of paid inclusion seem to say that if you are planning any sort of PPC campaign on keywords and phrases that cost > $0.30, you are wasting money by not doing paid inclusion first. Add to these economics the surveys that show users put more trust in organic links than paid placements (60% / 40% last I saw), it would seem that paid inclusion is an obvious choice.

[Trellian]

Welcome dubert,

Yes another reason why Paid Inclusion makes sense.

Cheers
David

[qwerty]

Add to these economics the surveys that show users put more trust in organic links than paid placements (60% / 40% last I saw), it would seem that paid inclusion is an obvious choice.

I know I'm pulling things a little off-topic, but this is one of the things that bothers me about the program.

This is a PPC program. Your position may not be based on how much you pay (since everyone pays the same amount), but the fact that you can keyword stuff the XML feed without changing the page tells me that having such a listing show up in the organic results without even a label of some kind is just deceptive. People prefer to click organic results because they feel they have reason to believe that those results are based on the actual relevance of the pages to the query, but pages that got to the results via paid inclusion don't even have to speak directly to the query.

It's taking advantage of the user's trust in the algo to have these results show up as if the page itself was found to be algorithmically relevant.

[Trellian]

It's taking advantage of the user's trust in the algo to have these results show up as if the page itself was found to be algorithmically relevant.

well technically the pages are relevant, as with XML feeds you can not place keywords in that are not relavant to that page, whether the keyword is in the page content or not.

The XML feeds are reviewed by Yahoo "human" editors that check the relevancy of all keywords added to the page, to make sure that this is not abused.

Cheers
David

Edited by Trellian, 15 September 2005 - 06:32 PM.