Paid Inclusion Engines and Topics Forum

Here are a few tricks:
Check your listing at HotBot using the Ink search to see when it was last updated in the index. Paid pages seem to be updated about once each week. I haven't identified a pattern for free pages yet, I'm guessing every three months or so. It may depend in part on when the page's content is updated.

When analyzing/comparing your competitors pages, use Pure Ink Search [search.positiontech.com]. Insure you're not comparing to a paid page by mousing over the competitor's link and looking for http*//redirect-east.inktomi.com in the link.

We have INK PFI, but cannot get any FREE pages in the index
despite ODP and GOOGLE DIR listings.

However, in recent days INK has listed our looksmart listing
in the index (shows up at no.1 for main keyword in PURE SEARCH)
We know this is looksmart listing because it has the looksmart title and the description they gave us.

Now the problem.

If we discontinue our looksmart account, will the listing
disappear from INK index?

BTW a mouseover in PURE SEARCH shows re-direction to
`looksmart.com`

Anyone had this before?

It was sort of like I was added to the end of an un-updated queue. A couple weeks later I did move to #1 for that three word phrase.

So I'd say just wait a couple weeks.

"(Then wait for Ink to randomly rank you anywhere between #6 and #601 for the same one word term during the course of two months.)"

Inktomi CAN NO LONGER BE OPTIMIZED FOR - PERIOD.

I hope Inktomi goes down the pan, MSN really should use Google results - ANYTHING other than Inktomi.

Ink is a waste of time, money, effort - UNLESS your random position is a high one, and the odds on that are proportional to the number of returned pages.

Sorry all - this is from experience with almost 100 domains in PFI on different accounts, and combined 20 years SEO experience from 3 different people - PLUS all the usual forum discussions.

The 'so-called' geo filtering used on the MSN UK results is appalling, and seems to pretty much filter out anything that isn't a .co.uk regardless of where it is hosted.

Hx TAGS
FONT + x
FONT - x
TITLE TAG
DESCRIPTION TAG
KEYWORD TAG
KEYWORD DENSITY
ONSITE OUTBOUND LINKS
ONSITE OUTBOUND LINK ANCHOR TEXT
ONSITE SUB-DIRECTORY NAME LINKS
ONSITE PAGE NAME LINKS
OFFSITE OUTBOUND LINKS
OFFSITE OUTBOUND LINK ANCHOR TEXT
OFFSITE DOMAIN NAME LINKS
OFFSITE SUB-DIRECTORY NAME LINKS
OFFSITE PAGE NAME LINKS
LINK POP OR PR EQUIV (IN ANY FORM)
KEYWORD DENSITY (TRIED < 1 TO =100)
KEYWORDS IN DOMAIN NAME
DOMAIN EXTENSION
SUB-DOMAIN NAME
FONT STYLE
JS REDIRECTS
IMAGE NAMES / OTHER MEDIA NAMES (OR PRESENCE OF)
ALT TAGS
COMMENT TAGS
UPDATE FREQUENCY (MORE DAMAGING THAN PRODUCTIVE)

In our opinion, the final position/range within the SERP has NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with any of the above.

If anyone can prove me wrong, then I will gladly try out the advice they give.

Club stINK 2003

Membership is free and the purpose of the club is to gather information on the premise that we suspect something fishy may well be going on over at INK - and we are going to get to the bottom of it.

Members of Club stINK 2003 feel that having paid for inclusion, we should have the right to know what we have purchased.

Members of Club stINK 2003 feel that INK should explain every single ridiculous drop in rankings, and if they do not explain these, then they are devious and utterly nasty - and should be avoided at all costs until they go bust, like any company who treats its customers with such contempt should.

Pageoneresults gave the basic formula earlier. I spend thousands a month on PFI. If the pages all ranked nowhere or utterly randomly, why would I spend over $100K per year on it? Even more, why would my clients let me spend their money that way?

It works - that's why.

Oh, Inktomi is owned by Yahoo. Unlikely for them to go bust in the foreseeable future.

If you can't rank, sounds like you have triggered a penalty to me - and the benefits of INKs MakeMeBottom plan :)

Tigger - link popularity does play a part even in PFI. The best way to overcome the .com geo-filter on MSN UK is through getting decent links. Also INK will also penalise orphan pages with no incoming links on PFI, in my experience.

How long would you leave it in between rebuilds? assuming I'm checking rankings on pure/hotbot

As an example, I have a page that was in BOW and is in PFI. For some reason, at the last main update, it fell from top 10 where it had been for 3 years to position 29. I had changed the page, it was reflected in the content but position didn't change until the last main update. I've now changed it back, and the new copy is reflected in the listing - but the position has remained at #29. I don't expect it to change until the next full update.

I've just checked on pure and my main keywords are returning 272,000 results so not too bad and the top listed sites are showing the redirect-west roll over so I assume they are PFI pages.

BOW = Best of Web

Heres a precise scenario.

I have a PFI root page in the index. (www.my-pfi-site.com)
It ranks very poorly in Inktomi - 459!, it used to be at number 1 and was there about a month. This was 6 months ago.

www.my-pfi-site.com is at number 2 in Google, and it has been since August 2002

www.my-pfi-site.com is at number 9 in Altavista - don't know how long.

Its presence in Google and Altavista - and the way it ranks well is indicative to me that neither of those two indexes view the site as spam - indeed it is true to say that this is not a spammy site in any way shape or form, no "tricks" - just a straight HTML site with a few sub pages which link back to the main page.

It has around 20 inbound links from other sites.

I went over to www.bestoftheweb.com and did a search for its keywords, the same words for which it ranks well on Google and Altavista.

I noted there that BOW returns 15 results, and that there is no "next results" link or anything so I could not check further, the 15 results returned by BOW are the same as the first 15 returned by MSN.

Still at BOW, I search for www.my-pfi-site.com, and it came up - so it appears to be in there.

My conclusion at the moment is that BOW is Inktomi, based on the identical first 15 results.

However - from reading the other posts here and the ones on the link from tigger, I really got the impression that Inktomi is using other databases in a similar manner to that used by Google. EG if you are in DMOZ, then Google gives you a boost - so I was thinking along the lines of, if you are in BOW, Ink gives you a boost. But BOW and Ink appear to be the same.

Can anyone put me straight - I am floundering around in the dark with the relationships between INK, BOW and the Inktomi Web Map described - again in the link from Tigger.

Any help would be appreciated.

As I say - my site is returned by a URL search on BOW, yet its 500+ in a search on MSN...........

Links from sites that are in the BOW.

>my site is returned by a URL search on BOW

You are really confusing me - probably because I am thick but :-

Before you said :-
"Fiver.
BOW = Best of Web"

And now you say :-
"You can't search on the BOW, it is a part of the Inktomi database and nothing to do with www.bestoftheweb.com"

Ok - so what you initially said was not referring to www.bestoftheweb.com.

I get that now - so - assuming then you need a link from BOW to get into BOW (In the same manner as google follows links then?), the next questions are the next logical step in my learning process :-

1. How do I establish whether any of my sites are currently in BOW?

2. Could there be a hidden search facility around do you think? a back door maybe as in a Puresearch equivalent?

3. If not, then maybe there is an indicator I am looking for on a SERP somewhere which tells me I am in or not?

I am targetting my efforts in the BOW direction primarily because of the statement made by Makemetop - which is :-

****"Sites which were in the BOW index are very hard to shift due to their inherent link popularity"****

With the above statement in mind I was thinking that it is of extreme benefit to be included in BOW, and also therefore, extremely detrimental to ranking if you are not in BOW.

Am I heading in the correct direction?

>How do I establish whether any of my sites are currently in BOW?

When you search using pure ink and mouse over the results if it's in the PFI scheme on the address bar it should show redirect-west-inktomi.com a site that is in the BOW will just show the URL.

Unless it's also in LookSmart. Our index page shows the redirect-west.inktomi/click?u=http://www.looksmart.com URL until the free clicks are exhausted each month. After that it shows our URL, but we can't shake the L$ title and description once those free clicks run out :(