I'll be honest. I thought paid inclusion for listings in search engines had gone away, and then one of my customers asked me for some advice about it.

It seems that they have been paying for Yahoo's paid inclusion program for a substantial amount of time and were asking me about its uses and benefits.

My instant response as I would imagine most good SEO's would be that paid inclusion really isn't worth it. After all, paying for inclusion carries no guarantee of a particular placement in that index - so what are you paying for? After all, it's not that difficult to get listed in any search engine - which is what you are paying for here - the tricky part is achieving a ranking. To get listed all you need are some credible links and a half decent website structure and you are away.

In the past search engines were harder to get listed in, in part because the crawl rate was slow. Also because of a slower crawl rate, it took longer for search engines to take account of the changes you had made to a site and re-determine the position on the SERP as a result of these changes. I'm certainly seeing now that the index is much "fresher" in all 3 of the major search engines as a result of more frequent crawling.

The historical benefits of paid inclusion was that you could get the search engine to take a look at the page on your terms, so that when you made changes you would file for re-inclusion and see if these changes had the desired effects.

I'm looking at the website of the company that provides this service and am somewhat baffled by some of the so-called advantages, they start by saying "Aside from the obvious advantage of appearing in the natural search results" - well this can be done quite easily without paying Yahoo an annual fee, I've worked on dozens of websites over the last 18 months - and all bar one was listed in Yahoo without paying them any money (and I know the reasons why that 1 didn't - frustrating reasons but not things I could encourage my client to change).

The next advantage is "...the ability to control the Title and Description text that are displayed for your site" - ummmmm, well correct me if I am wrong but isn't that what a <title> tag and Meta Description is for? I know that they might not always display correctly but there is the NOODP and NOYDR tags for most of the time when this isn't working - which has always been sufficient with me in the past. I absolutely agree with this statement that appears on their site "Comprehensible Titles and Descriptions have the advantage of giving the user a better understanding of the target site prior to clicking" but think that this needs to be done on the site itself for the benefit of users of all search engines.

Paid inclusion probably is useful for getting a previously banned site re-indexed but I can't see that I would recommend using it past that.

So my thinking is that in nearly all cases Yahoo's Paid Inclusion probably isn't worth it. Plus the fact that you get charged for every click! Where is the value in that!

So - in the title of this blog is a second question "Are there risks in dropping it?". I can't really find any evidence of this occuring but by following logic my thinking is that really there can't be risks in dropping this. I think this because paid inclusion grants you only that - inclusion in the index - NOT granting you a particular ranking. So the potential risk is that they stop indexing your site, but any rankings that are achieved have got there by merit. I am confident that with the client in question that the rankings that have been achieved in Yahoo have been achieved on the merit of the site and that by dropping this program all we are dropping is the so-called benefits of the program that can be achieved without this expense.

So - my advice if you have been paying for Paid Inclusion with Yahoo is that if you have achieved rankings those have been achieved by the merit of the site. Dropping to be included shouldn't affect those rankings in my opinion.