Whether to pay Search Engines for Listing
The net users often debate about whether it is okay for the search engines to charge for the web sites to be listed on them. The truth is the search engines also have a payroll, servers, and many other expenditures which need to be taken care of. A single site submission takes about 4 to 5 minutes to be reviewed. If in a single day, there are on an average 200,000 submissions on lets say Google, it would require about 1300 employees to go through all the submissions. This count does not include the supervisors, support staff, managers, etc.
The large number of employees would be required for the new submissions while a similar or a still larger number would be required for maintaining the database of the company. There are many things like changing of URL, removal of a site, etc. which also needs to be looked into.
So when people say that net should be free, what they essentially imply is that the net should not cost them anything, and all the costs should be borne by other people. If you want people to come to your site, you need to pay for it or be ready to wait a long time for measurable traffic.
LookSmart is one of the best means to reach the largest section of the Internet, since it caters to such websites as CNN, MSN, etc. Using LookSmart helps you to reach about 80% of the Internet audience. Converting this to numbers would imply that you would be ignoring an audience of about 60 million people and it is not in the benefit of any business to ignore such a huge number.
In case of the website being non-commercial, it can be submitted for a listing at no charge. The only drawback is that there is no assurance about the time frame when your site would be reviewed. If the website is commercial in nature, there are two ways to go about listing your site.
In the first method, you are required to pay a fee of US$ 99 and you can rest assured that the website would be reviewed within 8 weeks of payment. The second method involves paying US$ 199 and the site gets reviewed in just 48 hours. This fee is one time and will ensure that the website gets long term traffic for free. Being reviewed does not ensure being listed n the LookSmart directory.
Another engine, GoTo.com, gave a new model of payment wherein the site owners paid for every visit to the site and not for the listing on the engine. When adding one’s site on GoTo, one can add as many keywords as required as per one’s site. All you have to decide is the amount you will be paying for each visit to the website. The more amounts you pay per visit, higher would be the site listing.
The cost of the keywords is determined by the number of people bidding for that particular keyword for traffic. It is advisable that you bid for the keywords that ensure that you are among the first five websites listed on the first search result page.
It is essential to be listed on Yahoo, since it is the largest search engine. This is one web engine where paying for your website’s list is essential, as the free submissions of websites do not get reviewed. If you pay the US$199 as fee, you can rest assured that the site will be reviewed in matter of 7 days.
There are other search engines which are similar to GoTo, such as Rocketlinks. It has been growing steadily and is giving good results also.
