Advantages of Permission-Based Indexing

1. Partial/supplemental indexing is no longer necessary. Webmasters can use their site structure to indicate to both users and search engines which content should be viewed and which should not. Only those links which have some connection to the home page of a site, direct or indirect, will be crawled and indexed fully, whereas those links which are not attached in any way will not.
2. A partnership would be formed between a search engine and its webmasters. Webmasters will work with search engines to build better sites and make the content they wish to be indexed more reachable, and search engines will be able to provide webmasters with the flexibility to use their sites to control what they wish to see submitted (or not submitted as the case may be.)
3. Under construction content is kept to a minimum. Webmasters who choose to generate hyperlinks to under construction pages or testing sites will still be able to do so without the threat of accidental indexing.

4. Pages designed to manipulate search engines will be greatly reduced. Pages designed to unethically manipulate search engines will either have to have a hyperlink contained within the site itself, or be used as the entire “content” of a site.

   This does not suggest that such pages will cease to exist: however, it will become significantly harder for black hat search engine optimization specialists to apply these techniques, as they will now be required to be a part of the website structure.

5. Issues concerning affiliate hyperlinks and hyperlinks containing session hashes/IDs would be resolved. Since affiliate hyperlinks and hyperlinks containing session hashes would not be part of the normal structure of a website, there would be no need to crawl them anymore, nor is there need to assign any inbound link credit to them for the purposes of ranking. More credit, therefore, would go toward any organic hyperlinks on pages containing said affiliate hyperlinks and links containing session hashes.
6. Webmasters have full control over which content should and should not be indexed. By building easy-to-navigate websites with a clear hyperlink structure, webmasters will be able to indicate website content portions which should and should not be indexed. This would serve the dual effect of increasing website usability, as an increase in the ability for a search engine spider to determine how to traverse a website would likely also translate into an increase in the ability of the end user to navigate the site in the way that the webmaster sees fit.

7. Resources required by a search engine will be reduced, and by extension so would search engine operating costs. External hyperlinks would no longer need to be traversed unless a webmaster has specifically indicated his/her approval, and therefore bandwidth consumption used by a search engine spider and datacenter storage space would be reduced.

   Alternatively, bandwidth required by the spider could be reallocated to the reindexing of external hyperlinks to permission-enabled websites, allowing for more frequent updating and more frequently refreshed content.

8. Bandwidth resources required by servers to accommodate search engine spiders will only be allocated when necessary. This allows for reduction in web hosting costs caused by bandwidth used when crawling content that may not merit inclusion.
9. The technology already exists within the Google Sitemaps service itself. It doesn’t need to be recreated from scratch; it merely needs to be reapplied to the permission-based indexing service.
10. Permission-based services are already being implemented. Such things as e-mail marketing, direct mail, and telephone solicitation are making increasing use of permission-based, opt-in lists to the general acceptance of the public.
11. Immediate removal of abandoned sites. There are a number of sites which are in the index and have been abandoned or not updated for a significant period of time. Some of these sites would be removed simply because webmasters would no longer care to resubmit them. This removes dead content from the index.
12. Webmasters that do not wish to gather inbound links are not required to do so. While it is the author’s personal belief that a webmaster should take every opportunity to acquire links to his/her site whenever it is feasible to do so, many webmasters and site owners do not wish to do so due to the cost and time factors involved, and they should be given the right to make this choice.