How Do Paid Placement and Paid Inclusion Effect Search Result Rankings?

Screen shot of Teoma with paid ranking highlighted.

 

Don't assume that inclusion in the top 10 or 20 results is based on content merit alone. Be aware that sites ranked in the top 20 returns, while relevant, may have paid to be there.  A dedicated researcher will look beyond the first pages and not be biased against results that are 'lower on the list'. Intense competition for the top 20 spots associated with a keyword has created an income opportunity for search engines.  Webmasters can buy their way into the top twenty by paying a placement premium.

Many search engines sell accelerated inclusion or placement.  These Search engines include Google, Yahoo, LookSmart, Teoma, Ask Jeeves, Alta Vista, Lycos, Inktomi and FAST. Some search engines such as Google, distinguish paid placement by setting paid sites to one side of the page.  Others mix paid sites directly into the rankings with no way for the user to distinguish which sites have paid for high placement.   Paid Inclusion is another common practice of popular search engines.  Since it can take weeks or even months before a search engine includes a web site in its index, some webmasters are willing to pay to be quickly included in a search engine's database.  Paid inclusion does not guarantee any precedence in the rankings; it just expedites the process of being indexed by the search engine.  

What are Webmaster tricks?  Do they affect page ranking?

Search engine ranking algorithms are constantly being revised to improve performance and screen out 'webmaster tricks' that attempt to unfairly skew page ranking. These tricks, sometimes called spamdexing, are attempts to fool search engines.  Flooding a home page with keywords or loading the HTML meta-tag feature with keywords are examples of spamdexing.  

Screen shot of Word Spy page defining spandexing.

 

Search engines have counter programmed their indexing systems to identify illicit attempts to 'spam' the relevancy rating of a page.  In some cases offending websites are banned and removed from the search engine index altogether.  Google no longer considers 'meta-tags' because this feature of HTML that provides descriptive keywords to search engine 'crawlers' is frequently abused.

From The Word Spy: http://www.wordspy.com/words/spamdexing.asp

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Authored by Dennis O'Connor 2003-2004