DM News: Will Paid Inclusion Be Banished?

Paid inclusion - the practice of letting advertisers pay to have their sites show up in search engine results - seems increasingly endangered. Now that MSN and Ask Jeeves have abandoned the practice, in an effort to become more searcher friendly, Yahoo remains the last major holdout relying on the business.

Paid inclusion relied to a certain extent on user gullibility, an assumption that most searchers were not sophisticated enough to understand that the sum of advertiser sites could not be as useful a pool of pages to search as a more generally inclusive web index. Some companies even maintained that the fact that advertisers were willing to pay money for a particular audience de facto signified that the advertiser's site was relevant to the search term.

Now that search marketing is so popular, and demand is outstripping supply, the supply-reducing paid inclusion premise is rapidly losing appeal.