Anyone using Paid Inclusion?

EliteAF · #1 (**permalink**) 01-17-2008, 04:44 PM

I was recently pitched by an SEO company to get involved with Yahoo Paid Inclusion - where you can "pay" for placement in the organic listings of Yahoo. They made it sound easy - just set up a feed and they can get me listed for any keyword I wanted at a mere $.25 per click.

2 months later, the only placements that they had accomplished for me were on my own company name (which I already listed well for - and for free at that). The campaign still has not done squat.

What am I getting wrong here? Has anyone else gone down this path. Have I been snookered?

**wige** · #2 (**permalink**) 01-17-2008, 05:24 PM

Yeah... about that... you can't "buy" placement in the organic listings. The only thing you can buy your way into with Yahoo is inclusion in their paid directory, inclusion in which is not necessarily a bad thing - it is a strong link for Google, and it might have some small impact on your rankings in Yahoo's search. However, in most cases that is something you would pay Yahoo for directly.

The only other place you can pay to be listed is in the Sponsored Results. This is the only place I can think of that the SEO company would be putting you because they mentioned you would pay by the click, and there is nowhere else on Yahoo that you would pay to be on a per-click basis.

**mjtaylor** · #3 (**permalink**) 01-17-2008, 05:36 PM

Well, that's not exactly accurate as I understand it. There is a paid inclusion program that gets your site listed in Yahoo's organic results, and I used ia few years ago for a couple of clients that couldn't seem to get listed in Yahoo. And it did get them into the organic SERPs but not with any particular placement.

Those clients no longer pay and are in the SERPs doing okay.

MJ

**incrediblehelp** · #4 (**permalink**) 01-18-2008, 12:55 AM

All paid inclusion does is get your website spidered, which will more than likely get it indexed. I do not recommend using Yahoo paid inclusion at all. I have dealt with it before for a client that was signed up before I started helping them. Once we turned it off basically Yahoo delisted all their URLs. Pretty crappy of them. Dont worry about aid inclusion, it is a thing of the past.

Webnauts · #5 (**permalink**) 01-18-2008, 12:57 AM

Paid submissions are a piece of crap. You can get your site indexed in the organic search for free any time.

**wige** · #6 (**permalink**) 01-18-2008, 11:26 AM

The only benefit of paid inclusion I can see is the reports look interesting, but then again I love bar graphs and spreadsheets for some reason. Paid submission has no guarantee of ranking, only that your site will be crawled on a certain (supposedly accelerated) schedule. Being in the program has absolutely no impact on rankings, only indexing. It will not get your site to the front page.