The Marketleap Report
Volume III, Issue #9, October 16, 2003

Be it Resolved that Paid Inclusion is Search
- A Response to I-Search and Paid Inclusion Naysayers
by Keith Boswell

Recently Andrew Goodman of Traffick.com took over as the new moderator for I-Search, an email newsletter from MarketingWonk.com comprised of moderated discussions around search engine marketing. In his inaugural issue as moderator, Andrew dropped the following comment for discussion, "Be it resolved that paid inclusion is not search!"

Working for a search paid inclusion provider myself, I knew I could help shed some light on this topic and help explain why just the opposite of Andrew's statement is true. Saying "Paid inclusion is not search" is the equivalent of saying the Yellow Pages isn't a business directory.

Let's start by trying to lay some definition around search, something that Andrew chose not to do. Search is the online experience of going to a search feature at a portal or search engine and typing in words to find something that is relevant to that keyword phrase. Once the results for that search have appeared, the end-user determines relevance.

Paid inclusion is online search at its purest. Barriers to indexing for publishers and commerce sites are quickly removed. Until search engines are routinely crawling the entire published Internet, which most researchers estimate can't happen for at least another 10 or more years, paid inclusion guarantees that pages are indexed quickly and available to people searching. If current views are correct, only 20% of the published web is available at any of the leading search engines.

Andrew mentioned some anecdotal statistics from Looksmart stating that 25% of all searches were unique. Marketleap finds that number to be quite low. Our paid inclusion clients typically see a unique query average of 60% or higher. A typical keyword report usually shows many instances of a single search resulting in a single click. How would you ever optimize for all of the keyword combinations? Could you ever afford to buy all of those keywords at auction?

Search is ultimately about relevancy. Paid inclusion means a page can be found if it's relevant. Why should websites be excluded from the index and being relevant if they are willing to pay their way in? Does it somehow warp relevancy? The fact is that many sites have highly complex challenges when it comes to being indexed - and paid inclusion addresses those challenges head on.

Reading online forums and talking to people, some marketers and webmasters say that XML feeds are a form of spam to the system. Most optimizers that don't use paid inclusion aren't aware of the fact that pages being fed in through XML undergo more human editorial review than any natural pages in the index.

One of the reasons that Inktomi made a dramatic cut in the number of "trusted" resellers for their paid inclusion programs was to create higher relevancy in the index and work more closely with resellers that they feel they can trust to ensure only high quality content is being fed into the index.

I think it's very important that marketers understand how much closer paid inclusion is to the concept of Search than paid placement is. Paid inclusion is natural search with guaranteed indexing, paid placement is a media buy.

Looksmart is not paid inclusion like Inktomi, FAST, or AltaVista offer. It's a hybrid paid-placement program. It always has been. MSN's recent decision to drop Looksmart in January happened because they wanted to improve relevancy. Their tests showed that MSN was more relevant with Overture and Inktomi results than when results contained Overture, Looksmart, and Inktomi.

Google makes things even harder. Because Google doesn't' have a paid inclusion program, public customer support questions go unanswered, and marketers wait months to see if pages or their optimization changes have been included in the index at all. If you want someone at Google to take a look at a problem you're having, you're going to need to have a large advertising budget and some determination.

Then you'll need to press on your sales rep to see if an engineer can look into what's going on. If you're lucky, you might get some information or even have news that an engineer is looking into the problem and potentially fix it. You might even get a link to the Webmaster FAQ, which you've only read a million times while searching for the answer yourself. We have more stories like this if you're interested and I'm sure that many of the I-Search readers and others working to market their websites in Google have experienced similar issues.

Inclusion programs give access to customer support and search experts to answer questions quickly. How much better will you sleep at night knowing indexing and customer support with search engines is taken care of? Would you rather live in the dark and just wait it out?

So let us resolve together that paid inclusion is one of the purest forms of search. For the future of relevancy and end user satisfaction, let us choose to work together to keep the indexes clean and free of clutter and mischief. If inclusion won't get us there, nothing will.

Still have questions or feel confused about paid inclusion? Have a story about your own experience? Share it with me. Seriously, we're ready to discuss this further because we feel like some people still don't get it. Send email to report@marketleap.com.

Add the Marketleap Report to your site using our XML/RSS feed.