Paid Inclusion Programs and Cloaking Meta Tags

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Can you provide a list of all the search engines that
provide paid inclusions?

John Liang

Answer:

Hi John,

Here’s a list of the paid inclusion programs currently provided
by the major search engines and directories:

i) Inktomi – By using Inktomi’s paid inclusion program, you can
get your site listed within 48 hours in Inktomi’s index which
provides results for other major engines like Hotbot, IWon and
MSN. The current cost of getting yourself listed in Inktomi
through one of their paid inclusion partners named Trellian is
$38.95 for the first URL and $24.95 for each subsequent URL. We
provide a special co-branded Inktomi inclusion service for our
customers through Trellian. You can access this at:

http://www.1stSearchRanking.com/t.cgi?99&inktomi/

While Inktomi says that it may still spider sites which have not
paid to be included, our tests indicate that for most sites that
have not paid, Inktomi only spiders 1 page from that site and
ignores most of the other pages. Also note that paying Inktomi
for inclusion does not guarantee that your site will be ranked
well in the Inktomi affiliated engines – it only guarantees that
your pages will be spidered by Inktomi.

ii) Yahoo! – Yahoo!’s $299 business express submission service
allows your site to get reviewed by a Yahoo! editor for possible
inclusion in their directory. This is an annual fee – i.e. if
your site is accepted after the review, Yahoo! will charge you
$299 every year for keeping your site listed in their directory.
Note that the $299 fee does not guarantee that your site will be
listed in Yahoo!’s directory – it only guarantees that a Yahoo!
editor will review your site within 7 business days. You can find
out more information about Yahoo!’s business express submission
service at http://docs.yahoo.com/info/suggest/busexpress.html
Paying Yahoo! the $299 fee to get listed is mandatory for
commercial sites and optional for non-commercial sites. You can
find out how to get the best results from your submission to
Yahoo! by reading my article at:

http://www.1stSearchRanking.com/t.cgi?99&yahoo-submission.htm

We also offer a guaranteed Yahoo! registration service in which,
for a consultation fee of $199, we will guarantee that your site
will be listed in Yahoo! after you have paid the $299 business
express submission fee. If your site is not listed, we will
return not only our $199 consultation fee but also the $299 fee
that Yahoo! charges. You can find out more about our guaranteed
Yahoo! registration service at:

http://www.1stSearchRanking.com/t.cgi?99&yahoo.htm

iii) AltaVista – AltaVista’s paid inclusion program allows you to
get your site listed in AltaVista’s index within 2 business days
for a period of 6 months. From August 1 – August 15, they are
offering a discount of up to 50% for their paid inclusion
program. The prices charged by them until August 15 for 6 months
of guaranteed inclusion are as follows:

1st URL: $29
URLs 2 – 10: $19 each
URLs 11 – 500: $17 each

You can find out more information about AltaVista’s paid
inclusion service at:

http://www.altavista.com/sites/search/express_incl

Like Inktomi’s service, AltaVista’s service does not guarantee
that you will be ranked well in AltaVista – it only guarantees
that your site will be listed in it.

iv) Fast – Fast provides the results for its own engine at
http://www.alltheweb.com as well as for Lycos. Its paid inclusion
program allows you to get your site listed in its database within
48 hours. It charges an annual membership fee of $18 and an
additional $12 per year for every URL that you want to submit.

You can find out more about this program at:

http://www.alltheweb.com/help/submit_site.html

Like Inktomi and AltaVista’s services, Fast’s program does not
guarantee that you will be ranked well in Fast or Lycos – it only
guarantees that your site will be listed in its index.

v) Looksmart – Looksmart’s paid inclusion program is actually
based on a pay per click model – you pay 15 cents for every
visitor that Looksmart sends to your site. In order to use this
service, you need to pay a setup fee of $49 and a minimum
refundable deposit of $150 which would be used to pay for the
clicks.

You can find out more about this program at:

http://listings.looksmart.com/?synd=none&chan=lshomebus

Among the paid inclusion programs mentioned above, we currently
recommend only Inktomi’s and Yahoo!’s programs.

We recommend Inktomi’s program because while getting included in
Inktomi does not guarantee a top ranking in the Inktomi
affiliated engines, if you do manage to get your site ranked
well, you will be able to get a reasonably large amount of
traffic from the Inktomi affiliated engines. Furthermore, it has
become almost impossible getting more than 1 page in your site
included in Inktomi’s database without paying.

We recommend Yahoo!’s program because a good ranking for some of
your keywords in Yahoo! can lead to a substantial amount of
traffic to your site.

We don’t recommend AltaVista’s program because our tests indicate
that while sites which do not pay AltaVista do take a while to
get spidered, they eventually DO get spidered. Furthermore,
AltaVista’s popularity among users has dropped remarkably of late
– we have seen sites that have top rankings in AltaVista for
extremely popular keywords get as little as 1 visitor a day from
AltaVista while top rankings for the sites in Google for the same
keywords have led to dozens of visitors every day. Lastly,
AltaVista’s prices are for a 6 month period, and you have to
renew after 6 months. This makes AltaVista’s program
prohibitively expensive for most web site owners.

We generally don’t recommend Fast’s program because like our
tests with AltaVista, our tests with Fast indicate that sites
which do not pay Fast can get listed eventually. However, unlike
AltaVista, Fast (and Lycos which takes its results from Fast) can
send a reasonable number of visitors to your site if you get
ranked well in it. So if you are in a hurry to get as many
visitors as possible and don’t want to wait until Fast spiders
your site, you may consider paying Fast to get listed. Another
point in favor of Fast is that its prices are quite reasonable as
compared to Inktomi and AltaVista.

Earlier, Looksmart used to charge a one-time fee of $299 to get
listed in its directory. We used to recommend that clients get
listed in Looksmart by paying the $299 fee because it gave them
the opportunity to get a good ranking in MSN (whose primary
search results are taken from Looksmart). However, we no longer
recommend Looksmart’s program because we have serious
reservations about the quality of the visitors that Looksmart has
been providing after it switched from its one-time $299
submission fee to its 15 cents per click program.

QUESTION 2:

Does page cloaking differ from cloaking your meta tags to prevent
competitors from mimicking your work to get good positions? If
so, how is it different. If not, how do you protect your meta
tags?

Jim Smith

Answer:

Hi Jim,

Page cloaking refers to the technique of presenting a particular
version of a page to a human visitor and another version of the
same page to a search engine. It is generally used to present a
keyword rich page to a search engine and an aesthetically
pleasing page to a human visitor. For more information on page
cloaking and why you should not use it, refer to my article on
this topic at:

http://www.1stSearchRanking.com/t.cgi?99&page-cloaking.htm

Cloaking meta tags refers to the process of ensuring that the
meta tags that you have used in a page are not visible to your
visitors when they try to look at the source code of your page.
You can find more information on how to cloak meta tags at:

http://fantomaster.com/fafaqcloak3.html#metatags

However, in my opinion, there is hardly any reason why you would
want to cloak your meta tags. The reason is that unlike what many
people still believe, the meta tags that you have used hardly
affect your rankings any more. What is much more important is the
Title tag that you have used and the content in the body of the
page. Hence, if you are ranked well in the search engines and if
competitors think that they can get good rankings by simply
copying your meta tags, good luck to them. They must do a lot
more than simply copy your meta tags in order to get good
rankings.

The only other reason that someone might want to cloak meta tags
is to prevent competitors from looking at the keywords for which
you want to get top rankings in the search engines. While this
may be a plausible reason, when tools like WordTracker are
available to anyone on the Internet who wants to know what
keywords to target, competitors won’t need to look at your source
code to see what keywords they should be targeting. WordTracker’s
keyword research tool is available at:

http://www.1stSearchRanking.com/t.cgi?99&wordtracker/

August 14, 2002

Sumantra Roy, president of 1st Search Engine Ranking.net, is one of the most respected and recognized search engine positioning specialists on the Internet. Sumantra’s articles on search engine optimization have been widely published and quoted in different web sites and newsletters on the Internet. His unique formula for establishing the most appropriate keywords for a site has been used by WordTracker, the most popular keyword research tool on the Internet. This formula is also used by many other search engine optimization companies for establishing the most appropriate keywords for their clients’ sites.

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