News - Search Engines

Mister Wong, a popular bookmarking engine, sent out an email to users this morning notifying them of its intention to convert to a pay model for commercial bookmarks. 

With a Pagerank of 8, Mister-wong asserts that it has been under heavy fire from bots and spammers and cannot continue cleanup efforts without some form of compensation. To effect this change, users who are non-commercial can apply to have their account reviewed and approved as a free account, but with new non-commercial terms. All others need to upgrade to commercial packages which start at $2 per month for 10 saved bookmarks. At the top end, commercial accounts can save 10,000 bookmarks for $72, or nearly $ 0.01 per bookmark.

The notice to users, listed at http://www.mister-wong.com/payments/notice/ and clearifying for commercial users at http://www.mister-wong.com/payments/upgrade/ is the first publicly posted commercial upgrade service for a bookmarking engine. With its page authority intact, mister-wong looks to come out ahead as exploiting holes in getting link juice is becoming a full-time, and well-paying job for many black hat search engine masters.

Is this the way of the future on the internet - will all things SEO in fact become paid subscriptions for commercial accounts? Frankly such a change is long overdue. So what if with two you no longer get a free eggroll. Abusive webmasters have been gaming the system too long to be useful.