Just when you thought it was safe…

Anyone involved with search engine registration has learned first hand the pain of keeping up with the latest options for registering your Web site. As the search engine companies seek revenue and improvements to their bottom line, free indexing is giving way to paid advertising.

Paid listings are the newest tactic to raise revenue. Sites can now participate in Yahoo's Content Acquisition Program to be indexed by Yahoo, MSN, and Ask Jeeves. With this new service, advertisers pay to have their sites surveyed by Yahoo software that crawls the Web looking for content. This increases their chances of being included in search results. In the past, these Web crawlers would eventually index a site but the large number of Web pages now makes the timing for such indexing unpredictable and the new fee option insures indexing.

All three companies do not distinguish paid from unpaid listings but claim that they do not let advertising influence search results. Google and AOL do not offer paid indexing and prefer to use a neutral, technology driven approach. Google co-founder Larry Page said Google separates and labels advertising, much the way newspapers distinguish between news stories and advertising.

The FTC is looking into the use of paid inclusions and has asked the search engine companies that use the paid inclusion programs to provide consumers with a clear description of how the plan works. In the case of Yahoo, you can click on the What's This? link to learn more.

Costs for the Yahoo! Content Acquisition program run $49 annually for your first URL and $29 each for URL's 2-10, and $10 each for the 11th URL and beyond. Cost-per-click fee's run between $.15 and $.30 depending on the categorization of your site.

search engine

Search Engine Shares
According to the comScore Media Metrix rankings from August 2003, the top five search engines account for 94% of all Internet search traffic.