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Paid inclusion

　　Paid inclusion is the process of paying search engines to index pages from your site. It is also often called PFI (Pay for Inclusion) or PPI (Pay Per Inclusion). Paid inclusion products are provided by most search engine companies, the most notable exception being Google.

　　Paid inclusion has always been a tricky concept to explain, but understanding it is important to both webmasters and searchers, as recent changes have suddenly made paid inclusion commonplace with search engines. The fee structure is both a filter against superfluous submissions and a revenue generator. Typically, the fee covers an annual subscription for one webpage, which will automatically be catalogued on a regular basis. A per-click fee may also apply. Each search engine is different. Some sites allow only paid inclusion, although these have had little success. More frequently, many search engines, like Yahoo!, mix paid inclusion (per-page and per-click fee) with results from web crawling. Others, like Google (and as of 2006, Ask.com), do not let webmasters pay to be in their search engine listing (advertisements are shown separately and labeled as such).