Using Pay-for-inclusion engines

[ppeter]

Pay for inclusion search (PFI) engines cost lots of money and unless you have a site as big as, say www.Amazon.com, then it isn't worth it.

Which means you wait weeks for your site to even be considered for indexing. However, I am thinking that so long as your site has a site map that is optimised well for search engines, giving access to all the most important pages of your site, and the rest then its a lot simpler...

Surely, you can just pay for your site map to be indexed, then the search engine will index the rest of your site, anyway? A smaller one-off fee that gets you indexed quickly, but without all that money for all your important pages!

Or will the engines only index the site map?!

Answers greatly appreciated.

[Mel]

Inktomi is well known for only spidering the pages that you pay for.

I had a #1 ranking for a competitive keyword at MSN for three years based on a page I paid for inclusion, and that was the only page they ever spidered.

Other engines behave in different ways. Alltheweb (which also feeds Lycos) will normally find and index all your pages within thirty days if you submit a site map to them and of course Google with its 80% search share does a great job of spidering a site if you just a link from DMOZ, or if you can't wait for that, submit your sitemap to their submit url page.

I would consider Inktomi PFI for some of your most important pages if they are not picking up your pages, since they are going to have a major search share when yahoo starts to use them.