AltaVista Goes Pay to Stay

• Jul. 2, 2001

After a period of sitting back and watching Inktomi's foray into the paid inclusion arena, AltaVista has announced they're following suit. Like Inktomi, the AltaVista program does not carry any influence on actual rankings. It simply ensures that AltaVista's spider will visit the pages on a weekly basis and include them in it's crawl. As we suspected back when Inktomi made their announcement, this additional source of revenue has proven to be too attractive for other search engines too ignore.

Rumours of the paid inclusion program have been circulating for some time. In fact, AltaVista itself spilled the beans when they unveiled their bizarre "Ransom Note" add url feature in March. Some pages talking about the paid inclusion program were accidentally (?) put online at the same time. In hindsight, perhaps the "Ransom Note" was an all too appropriate moniker for AltaVista's scheme.

The pricing for AltaVista's program is substantially more expensive than Inktomi's. The program allows for a maximum of 500 URL's, and the price starts at $78 for the first URL for one year, dropping to $48 for the next 9, $38 for 11 to 100 and $24 for 101 to 500. Adequate coverage for an extensive site could cost site owners thousands of dollars annually.
The move by AltaVista is just one more step in decimating the "even playing field" that the Net once prided itself on being and making online visibility a game for only the richest players.

AltaVista Opens Paid Inclusion
Searchenginewatch.com, July 2, 2001