There may be a time coming soon where the only way to have your website found under highly competitive keyword phrases in the major search engines will be to pay for it however, as mentioned in this article, the days of Paid Inclusion are coming to an end.
Ask Jeeves just recently announced their upcoming drop of the $30 Paid Inclusion, leaving Yahoo as the only major search engine still charging for inclusion, but Yahoo’s Paid Inclusion is wrapped up in their new PPC costs through the SiteMatch program.
Since Yahoo introduced its controversial site match program many have avoided payment and still managed to find them selves ranking well in the SERPs. Yahoo says that SiteMatch does not influence placements, and so far this proves true.
Some of those not willing to pay to be part of the SiteMatch program are opening up Overture PPC Campaigns and finding themselves in the sponsored section of Yahoo SERPs on the first page at a lower PPC rate while avoiding the $49 review fee. Now this of course does not work with all keyword phrases, as many run into several dollars per click, but it is a work around for some webmasters with more targeted or niche keywords.
PPC ads are making companies like Google and Yahoo plenty of money so it only seems natural from a search engine perspective to charge. Google says right in their site “Google does not accept payment for inclusion of sites in our index, nor for improving the rank of sites in our results.†But with the difficult to predict Google updates such as Florida and Austin, there is no certainty sites will remain in the top SERP’s, forcing some site owners into advertising with AdWords.
More and more site owners are being driven to PPC to solidify their traffic. This is not only driving up the cost for popular keywords, but creating a wave of PPC engines as everyone tries to get a piece of the action. PPC is certainly not going anywhere any time soon, right now it is still possible to get high rankings in most of the SE’s, however PPC will one day, quite likely dominate the majority of the SERPs.
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Guest Columnist Scott Van Achte is the PPC Manger for StepForth Search Engine Placement. Since graduating from college last year, Scott has been working with StepForth Placement and has thoroughly enjoyed working in the search engine industry.
