Search Engines play a vital role in website promotion. They are the first stop for most people trying to find information, services and products online. Therefore, it is necessary that your website surfaces quickly in search results.

There are number of search engines on the internet, some of which offer a service called “Paid Inclusion”.
Paid URL Inclusion is a search engine marketing technique where you need to pay a specific amount to search engine as an annual fee for your web page to be included in their index.

The question now is, why pay, when most search engines have automated programs called ’spiders’ or ‘crawlers’ that index all the pages on the web for free?
It is true that search engines will find your page and index them with no cost but WHEN? It could take at least couple of months for search engines to finally index the entire website. This is where paid URL inclusion beats Free Inclusion – Speed. It offers faster indexing of your web pages.

Search engines that provide paid URL inclusion services, use an additional spider that goes out and indexes specific pages that have been paid for. Free spiders will find a site, follow the links and index the pages, but it will take some time and you could lose out on valuable traffic but a paid spider will index the pages that have been paid for, almost immediately.

Advantages of Paid URL Inclusion:
Quick Inclusion – after the payment is made, the website is indexed by the spider instantaneously.
Rapid re-indexing – the spider will return to the website very often, sometimes even daily!

Disadvantages of Paid URL Inclusion:
Cost – The biggest disadvantage is the charge. The annual cost for a ten page website ranges from $170 for Fast/Lycos to $600 for AltaVista.
Reach – Another disadvantage is the limited reach of paid URL inclusions. Popular search engines like Google, Yahoo and AOL do not offer paid inclusion. This implies that Paid URL inclusion will amount to only a small fraction of the daily traffic to the website.

In the end, the fact remains that search engines will still index websites whether they are paid inclusions or not. But if you want immediate indexing for your website on AltaVista, Lycos etc then you could opt for paid URL inclusion.

Google image search has now started showing Sponsored links at the top of the results page. This is still in the testing phase and these results are currently being shown only to a few users when they are signed in to their Google Accounts.

In 2007, Google had announced that they were losing out on as much as $200 million per year because they were not monetizing their Image Search pages. Today, though, a line of three “Sponsored Links” is showing.

Sponsored Links on Google Image Search

Why Google hasn’t done this earlier is a question worth asking.

Internet users, across the world consider Google the last word in the search arena and attribute a demi-God status to it. However, on Saturday(Jan 31) Google showed it’s human. A malware update resulted in losses of around $1.5 million and that too in only 40 minutes. So what went wrong?

As part of Google’s malware blocking system, if it detects any site containing malware, then Google warns the user that the particular site may contain malware and routes the user to a page which says “Do you really want to go to this site ?”. On Saturday morning, Google was displaying malware warnings alongside every site listed and because of this users were routed to the warning page, irrespective of the site having malware or not. So for 40 minutes users could not access  any sites from Google. Organic SERPs and PPC results were affected due to this.  Tech Crunch, was amongst the first to report this error. The screen shot captured by them(shown below) clearly shows what was wrong in the SERPS.

Google Malware

Google Blog explains what went wrong.

“What happened? Very simply, human error. Google flags search results with the message “This site may harm your computer” if the site is known to install malicious software in the background or otherwise surreptitiously. We do this to protect our users against visiting sites that could harm their computers. We maintain a list of such sites through both manual and automated methods. We work with a non-profit called StopBadware.org to come up with criteria for maintaining this list, and to provide simple processes for webmasters to remove their site from the list.

We periodically update that list and released one such update to the site this morning. Unfortunately (and here’s the human error), the URL of ‘/’ was mistakenly checked in as a value to the file and ‘/’ expands to all URLs. Fortunately, our on-call site reliability team found the problem quickly and reverted the file. Since we push these updates in a staggered and rolling fashion, the errors began appearing between 6:27 a.m. and 6:40 a.m. and began disappearing between 7:10 and 7:25 a.m., so the duration of the problem for any particular user was approximately 40 minutes.”

Google earns about $2.4 million an hour (total revenue), however since Saturday morning Pacific Time is a bit quieter, Google must not have lost that much. However, because of malware warnings people might have clicked more on PPC ads thus resulting in higher revenue. Google has definitely taken a hit, just that its difficult to find the exact amount. Also, since SERPS were down individual sites must have lost out on traffic and potential conversions. I know quite a few search engine marketers must be fuming because of this, its all part of the game, guys. Yahoo and MSN did enjoy this though as people started using their search engines. However since this error was only for 40 minutes, their happiness was short lived.”

Did your sites show a drop in traffic?  Were your conversions down? PPC traffic showed a surge??

Let me know!!