egomaniac - 5:16 pm on Oct 8, 2003 (gmt 0)

Personally, I think INK is honest and doesn't fix the results. At least that is my experience.

About 2 years ago, I bought a bunch of PositionTech INK listings as I was expanding my site and I wanted to test the new pages I was putting up. The contract was for 1 year. I got top rankings on competitive terms, #1 or #2 in many cases, due to redesign of my page internals.

When my PositionTech INK contract was up for renewal I was curious if I could stop the Paid Inclusion and maintain my rankings. I read up about others experience here at WebmasterWorld, and concluded that dropping out of Paid Inclusion was safe.

Here now a year after stopping paid inclusion, I still have the same rankings for my competitive keywords. Occasionally things move up or down a postion or two as you would expect with any search engine. But in no way have I been penalized by dropping out of INK's paid inclusion system.

When INK upgraded their system about a year ago, it was a big improvement, and I have been quite pleased with it.

The BWOnline story mentions Rob Spooner's site dropping in the rankings late last year. Speculation: its possible that his site dropped in rankings due to the INK changeover to their new database and search algo last fall.

The BWOnline story also mentioned the Lamps plus guy couldn't understand why he wasn't at the top of MSN. We'll under the current MSN system, you have to buy your way to the top through Looksmart. That's the way MSN is today - a hybrid of a directory and a search engine. That doesn't mean the search engine restults are tainted. Its just a different setup than Google.