Paid Search Engine Inclusion - PFI and PPC

There are a lot of people out there who have either heard of, or know something about Pay Per Click (PPC - which is also discussed in this site), and Pay For Inclusion (PFI), and here is what they mean.

PFI

For the past few years, many of the search engines (with the exception of Google) have offered a simple PFI model so you could speed up the indexing of any page of your site by paying a fee. This fee covered a year of inclusion in the search engines' index plus frequent re-spidering of the page if it met with the engines' quality requirements.

Many human-edited directories have also offered PFI programs in order to list your site. For instance, if you have a business or any type of commercial site, you have to pay Yahoo a $amount for them to consider your site for inclusion in their directory. Once reviewed by their editors, if they believe your site is up to snuff, they'll then add it to the directory, and you simply have to pay a yearly fee to keep it there.

The general consensus amongst Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) experts is that a Yahoo directory listing is not as beneficial as it used to be.

PPC

The search engines also offer PPC programs where you purchase ads that show up at the top, side or below the search results for the specific keyword phrases you bid on. Google's Adwords and Yahoo's Overture are the best known of these programs. Ads that you place with these companies show up on the search engines' results pages as well as content specific sites (if that option is turned on). Generally they are labelled as "sponsored" or "featured" results.

There are three important things to note about this program:

Firstly, the money you spend goes solely towards placing your site into the search databases, and enabling 48-hour re-spidering of your page content. You can pay them all you want, but this program is not going to give you a higher ranking, so keep that in mind.

Secondly, it's not actually necessary to pay to be listed. Yahoo is not removing pages that aren't paid for, and they continue to add new pages for free. Their spider (Slurp) is constantly on the crawl for new information, and new pages are in fact getting added fairly quickly these days - again, for free.

Finally, if your site has been around for a while and other sites are linking to it, chances are that your pages are already included in their index, so it wouldn't make sense to pay for what you already have, and then pay for every click thereafter.