Twilight Zone or Truth

[MichelleG]

Though my company has subscribed to Search Engine Watch for several months and benefited from its insights, this is my first foray into the forums. I'm hoping experts here can help me allay a clents concerns by either confirming my suspicion that there is little truth to this particular rumor or enlighten me as to which engines he's referring. His message follows:

I was talking with a guy earlier today about the web and he
said the some of the search engines are going to be changing
to have the first 5 pages of results be "paid only" advertisers,
and that optimization is only going to work for a few months yet.
Heard anything?

Help and Feedback are appreciated,
Michelle Gelles
Marketing Specialist
Digital iway Inc.

[randfish]

Michelle,

You can rest assured that this will not be happening in the foreseeable future. Major search engines currently have ads at the top and right sidebar of their pages, and this formatting has proven effective and profitable for them. I see little chance of a change in the future, and certainly there has been no news of a collaboration to shift towards entirely paid results in the first few pages.

Your associate has made a very bogus claim - I suggest you call him on it. I despise scare tactics like that, it's very unprofessional and you can let him know that.

[andrewgoodman]

The phrase "some of the search engines" is most suspect. Which one(S)?

- Google will never do this; not even paid inclusion; just PPC results near search results

- MSN won't be doing it either and probably will stick with no paid inclusion, just PPC results

- Yahoo has paid inclusion, which has its own problems, but they make so much money from PPC + inclusion, there is no way they're going to all paid results.

- Jeeves ain't perfect but they won't be doing this. Same reasoning, slightly smaller scale. No paid inclusion either.

Who's left? The last poster is right. Your colleague has made a bogus claim. When I hear someone refer to "the search engines" in general, I wonder how much they have been paying attention.

[MichelleG]

thanks for your feedback. my employer has told our client not to worry though we remain curious as to who managed to get the client panicked with this information and will be asking forinformation on his source