ALSO CALLED: Paid Inclusion, SEM, and Bid for Placement
DEFINITION: Paid inclusion is a search engine marketing model in which Web site owners pay a search engine company to guarantee their sites will show up in search results. In addition to guaranteeing that a client's Web site will be indexed, paid inclusion may ensure that the search engine's crawler software visits the client's site more frequently, and may also give clients the option  … 
Definition continues below.

SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING DEFINITION (continued): …  to submit information about their pages more often.

According to proponents, such as Yahoo, paid inclusion will help to improve the relevancy of results because it enables the indexing of Web pages that are difficult to access otherwise. Opponents argue that paid inclusion will skew search results, making the ranking less relevant. Although Yahoo and some other practitioners claim that paid inclusion doesn't affect the ranking of a paid link, the mere inclusion of links that would not otherwise be in the results is likely to change the rankings of some other links.

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