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Let's look at INK's "pay to play" plan

thread about your experience with inks new inclusion for $$$

         

stcrim

2:31 pm on Nov 14, 2000 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



This thread is for posting your experiences with the new INK and POSITIONTECH "pay to play" plan. Let's take an honest look at what's happened up to this point and what (if any) potential there is. Feel free to tell the good the bad and the ugly.

I have subscribed 5 pages, 1 was 4 days ago and the others were 3 days ago. None have been spidered by INK or included in any database.

So much for promise #1 about getting into the database in 48 hours. Will let you know when they to get in

rcjordan

2:54 pm on Nov 14, 2000 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Steve, first, would you give us the short list re where the significant INK-related referrals might come from? There's much confusion on this. This from another thread...

>But since most Ink partners who are in the PFP program bury the Ink results after DH, ODP or others, it appears a "top 10" is more like a "top 20-30". Not much traffic besides MSN.

added:
I registered 5 pages. According to the PTech website, it was spidered 2 days later. I'm seeing a slight up-tick in MSN.

stcrim

3:17 pm on Nov 14, 2000 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Bob,

I am hoping as people post their experiences with INK's "pay to play" plan here, some of the question you aked will be answered.

In my Kw's the MSN directory pages are going to be a problem. On the other hand, my phrase bids in GOTO are doing well in AOL, so there may be some INK hope there. Just gonna have to wait and see.

Anyone else with the good the bad and the ugly on Ptech and INK deal...

symmetry

3:28 pm on Nov 14, 2000 (gmt 0)



I pay to have ink spider my pages but when they display the links on hotbot they display my title as my url when my title tags clearly do not have that in them. When I translate the cloaked page on go, this is what I see. The <base href statement doesn't even exist on my page.
What is going on? I just want my title displayed correctly.
<html>

<head>
<title></title>
<base href="http://www.mydomain.com/" target="_top" >
</head>

<body >
</body>
</html>

<html>

<head>
<title>Low Mortgage Interest Rates</title>
<meta name="description" content="Find Low Mortgage Interest Rates from the leaders in low rates." >
<meta name="keywords" content="Low Mortgage Interest Rates" >
</head>

<body >

<h1>For Low Mortgage Interest Rates</h1>

<h2>To majority of superior American homebuyers choose the choice, expertise offered by interest rates.Locate interest rates in your area. </h2>

<h3>Licensed interest rates Mortgage Brokers</h3>

<h2>Wére <strong>the </strong>association of Mortgage for Brokers interest rates. </h2>

<h2> Find interest rates</h2>

<div align="center">

</div>

<h2>Our members plows experienced and ready to help you with all your interest rates needs. </h2>

Ross

4:01 pm on Nov 14, 2000 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



I registered a single page on 4th November. It has been updated every 2 days as promised. What's more, each of the Ink partners has indexed the updated page within 24 hours of the update. I'm impressed !!
(It's just a pity that each time I modify the page it drops further and further down the rankings, but I suspect that's just my stupidity !!:) )

DrCool

9:39 pm on Nov 14, 2000 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



I have submitted about 8 pages and they are showing up in HotBot, MSN, IWon and Looksmart. These pages were in Inktomi back around June/July before they were dropped and are now listing better than they were. Overall, I like this program. Rather than waiting for weeks and months to get listed, we can see results in a few days. It also will allow us to see what Inktomi is looking for since they will spider the pages regularly. I would give it a thumbs up.

jilly

12:58 am on Nov 15, 2000 (gmt 0)



Steve:

We put our main page in which was already in Ink, but wanted to see if it would stay and BE updated. So far it's still there <G> I doubt it is due to the payed plan though. We changed the description and meta tags before paying for the listing but they are the same. We payed to be updated basically on 11/03 -- they said they did it, but it's the same. Are they not updating the description when they "reindex" every 48 hours? Just curious... I'm waiting to see any differences in our traffic patters, nothing so far. Somehow I'm not surprised.

Jill

stcrim

1:10 am on Nov 15, 2000 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Jill with the next update if it doesn't change, I'd call'um. Also it's strange how the dates relate to the last time the pages were in the index (or something)

eljefe3

3:21 am on Nov 15, 2000 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Now,

has anyone seen an actual increase in traffic and sales, or are we just seeing good rankings and little traffic (aka northernlight)?

mayor

8:36 am on Nov 15, 2000 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



I'm seeing about a dozen visitors a day from a page optimized as far as I can go without trying to push my way up through a super-spammer's myriad of pages. If the spammer goes away, I estimate about a 4X increase in traffic, to maybe 50 visitors a day, which would make it worth the money. My pages are low income so I can hardly justisfy even $10 a year for ten visitors a day.

I've e-mailed PositionTech asking if anything will be done about the blatant mass spammers but they have not responded.

NFFC

12:26 pm on Nov 15, 2000 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Good article here [usatoday.com] from USA Today about pfp. Includes this gem from an Inktomi mouthpiece:

"...emphasizes that when a user does a search, the paying sites are sorted by the same relevancy and ranking algorithms as all other pages in the index, meaning that they have no better chance of being listed."

In the UK we call that being economical with the actuality.

gil

2:40 pm on Nov 15, 2000 (gmt 0)



I submitted three pages to Position Tech on Nov. 2, and sofar I am MORE than pleased with the results. The pages appeared in all of the portals by Nov. 5 and positions are as good or better than they were in the good old days of submitting thru Canada/Anzwers, etc. Updates are as promised sofar.

When I did have a problem initially Position Tech responded by email and then a phone call within 12 hours. Very impressed!

Gil

tigger

2:47 pm on Nov 15, 2000 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



I'm also very pleased with the results so far.

So I'm just submitting another 2 clients keywords today so it will be interesting to see there turn around now that more people are starting to use the service. hopefully I will still have the same views in 3 days

drbill

3:12 pm on Nov 15, 2000 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Very pleased so far.

jilly

6:12 pm on Nov 15, 2000 (gmt 0)



My listings remain the same - I know it's probably something I'm doing wrong but there are 404.html pages for sites listed in Ink that are ranking in the top 20 - wayyyy higher than I am - for certain keyword phrases! I paid for my listing - did the person with the 404.html pay for theirs? maybe but why? Am I disillusioned, you betcha!

jrjr

10:03 pm on Nov 15, 2000 (gmt 0)



i have been monitoring our pay for inclusions for about 2 weeks now.
prior to this whole thing we were doing great in inktomi. high rankings and good traffic for all main keyterms.

now that we have paid...pages are buried so deep, i find old crusty doorways of ours coming up ranked higher. and new pages we submitted for free, (optimized for different terms being searching for!) are coming up higher too.
its like we paid to become part of the old inktomi database (pre payinclusion)which would take all new submissions and bury them.

does this make sense? we have been submitting these paid pages monthly before the pay for inclusion thing occured, so we know that inktomi liked the pages.

so i called positiontech and spoke to an individual that basically said he did not know what to tell me. he said paying does not guarantee good rankings. he went further to say that he is suprised b/c i am the first one calling with a complaint. i was very suprised, almost honored, to hear that i was the first person in the WORLD to be complaining about the paid inclusion program.

consensus is pretty positive on this whole thing, not for some of the sites we paid for, b/c strangly others, new ones that were never in inktomi database prior to this, are doing fine.
draw your own conclusion, i have made mine.

dannysullivan

12:16 am on Nov 16, 2000 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



RE this:
I pay to have ink spider my pages but when they display the links on hotbot they display my title as my url when my title tags clearly do not have that in them.

Your title tags have nothing in them, from the code you posted. In that case, Inktomi resorts to displaying your URL, because it wants something to put in the title area of its listings (other than a blank). So, the solution is to put somethign in your title tags.

symmetry

4:07 pm on Nov 16, 2000 (gmt 0)



dannysullivan

Your title tags have nothing in them, from the code you posted. In that case, Inktomi resorts to displaying your URL, because it wants something to put in the title area of its listings (other than a blank). So, the solution is to put somethign in your title tags.

thanks for the input BUT on my actual page the title tags ARE filled with text. See I upload to my server with PCAnywhere and I suspect there is something wrong with the PCAnywhere File transfer OR there is a problem with the FP2000 I am using.

Bottom line is ... I create a page with title tags, then when I upload FTP, inktomi reports no title so they use the url instead.

I need help!

grnidone

6:30 pm on Nov 16, 2000 (gmt 0)



Paid to play on Monday. Spidered early this morning. Just like they said. I am not ranked on keywords, but, just like they said, they didn't guarantee placement.

-G

2_much

10:10 pm on Nov 16, 2000 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



I submitted 2 full sites and a doorpage on the on the 13th, received a confirmation on the 14th...Yesterday they were already appearing in Hotbot, Freeserve, AOL and MSN...The full sites were in the top 10 of Hotbot, MSN and AOL...the doorpage was in the top 10 of Hotbot, AOL and Freeserve...the full sites had been ranked before and are optimized sites...but the doorpage is brand new and had never been submitted...

We're going to submit a couple more sites to see what happens (mainly doorpages)...I'll keep posting about the results...

Although I'm less than thrilled at having to pay, I figure it's at least worth a shot... If it brings traffic, then the 20 bucks for the index pages will be more than worth it...We will quickly recover our investment, and then we have the rest of the year to reap the benefits...with the added bonus of being able to tweak the sites to find out what's working.

2M

mayor

9:56 am on Nov 17, 2000 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



I did receive a personal reply from Jim Stob at Positiontech in follow up to my inquiry about spammers. He basically said what we really already should expect ... they have no control over the Ink algorithm or Ink's handling of spammers. But it was nice to have someone take the time to write a personal response. It's obvious he cares about his customers, which is a switch from the direct inquiries to search engines that get ignored 99 times out of 100.

I'd say Jim Stob is on the webmasters side so I'll do what I can to support him.

yanton

1:33 pm on Nov 17, 2000 (gmt 0)



Out of interest, I posted this question to positiontech:

Hi, if I pay for say 20 url's to be crawled, will the links be spidered as
well, i.e. will it be a deep search, or just a spider of the page content
itself?

and got this reply:

The URL's you submit will be the only URL's crawled and indexed through this
program.

So, it really is a single page spidering service.

drbill

2:10 pm on Nov 17, 2000 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Yanton,

Yep the PFP only spiders that page/pages you pay for.

tigger

2:57 pm on Nov 17, 2000 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



well still on track submitted another 2 domaines and all my doorways are now in ink most ranking within the top ten in the various partners.

still happy. ;)

Chris999

6:05 pm on Nov 17, 2000 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Has anybody seen Positiontech submissions show up in Snap/NBCi or GoTo? If so, how long did it take?

stcrim

7:29 pm on Nov 17, 2000 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Chris999,

First, welcome to WmW an the INKTOMI forum - as to your question: Yes to goto and 5 days... (but that's how long it took my pages to get on line from PTech) I think most people are seeing the 2 day turn around - I just hit'um on a bad day...

Steve

makemetop

4:45 pm on Nov 18, 2000 (gmt 0)



tigger,

AOL UK appears to work off the 'small' Inktomi database. Have your paid for pages turned up in it at all yet? The reason I ask is (as predicted) a competitor has a load of doorway pages with identical titles/descriptions which have shown up on Freeserve and moved a few people down on one particular term and I assume they have paid for these pages, but they don't appear on AOL UK (or HotBot UK either), where my positions are much better than on Freeserve. These two seem to be working off a different Inktomi DB.

tigger

5:17 pm on Nov 18, 2000 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



makemetop.

I have now identical rankings/doorways in AOL.co.uk and freeserve. odd but the rankings in hotbot are nowhere ! and sites that are showing just under mine in AOL/Freeserve are also nowhere, is hotbot running of another ink database

P.S sorry to hear you lost some rankings was it for your DG company ?

oldtimer

12:17 am on Nov 19, 2000 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



I had a site ranked high in Ink until the September drop out. For all keyphrases it went to the 100s.

3 phrases just checked have now turned up in Freeserve, MSN and UK, AOL and UK - all in the top 5, mostly #1. In hotbot they're all at #11

They're also all dated Nov. 6th -
I haven't resubmitted, changed them or paid. There's something to be said for playing the waiting game. Mind you, they may not stay there.

makemetop

7:53 am on Nov 19, 2000 (gmt 0)



tigger,

It was for my site just on 1 term where I was squeezed down 4 places. Nothing too disastrous.

My site turned up in Hotbot UK the same time it did in Freeserve so it must be running a different DB to the others if you haven't appeared yet. Interestingly although my .co.uk site is listed high in HotBot UK and not my .com - it is the opposite on HotBot US where one of my .com sites is in the top 10 and the .co.uk at #30.

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