Forum Moderators: open
11/06/2001
Effective 12/17/01 URL substitution change:
URLs may be freely substituted during the first 30 days of subscription. Substitutions thereafter will be limited to within the domain.
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11/06/2001
Effective 11/17/01 Pricing for the Search/Submit program will be as follows.
URLs 2 - 1,000 - $25.00 each
:( :(
I'll drop PT a line asking for there clarification on this
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How many of you “customers” were informed that the pages that you previously paid for with swapping privileges would no longer have that right
How many of you “customers” were told whether the price increase would affect existing registrations or only new ones.
If my guess is correct – none of you. All of us had to learn about the changes from forums because the NEWS was buried on some link on PT’s site.
And all of us who do business on the net – who charge customers – who develop marketing campaigns – who base our fees on these charges – were not deemed worthy of notification.
This is not customer service. It is another example of the callous disregard for the members of the community who actually pay the fees.
Inktomi and their partners will charge whatever they want – will implement policies however they want – you and I are expected to shut up and pay the fees and be thankful that they exist.
I feel that’s a little hard on PT, anyone logging onto there account will see the page layout has changed and the News/ Updates is clearly on the top of the page, fair enough it’s a little unfortunate if perhaps you don’t monitor your listing’s that often.
But how many services warn people of an increase in cost/premium I can’t ever remember getting a letter from any service provider (gas/electric/insurance) warning of a price increase
Lets face it as a PR exercise it’s a lot better than Yahoo( tuff the price has just gone up like it or lump it)
PT can easily contact its customer base and advise them of pending changes. Why wouldn’t they?
While I’m at it, maybe they should respond to customer inquires. Since yesterday we have sent 3 emails for clarification on the new changes – no response.
Hard on PT? Someone raises prices 100% - removes part of the service we have already paid for and is afraid of telling anyone.
I don’t think I’m hard enough.
Welcome to WMW and the INK forum. The price of gas goes up and down all the time and Shell never calls me. They know if I want to use their product I will pay it.
It's the same with INK - no matter where you purchase your URL's you are going to pay what the going price is.
INKTOMI ownes the rights to your pages ranking well in MSN, AOL, HOTBOT and many others. And those "rankings" are for sale.
Just like the gas wars of the 60's and 70's a lot of people will not be able to compete and many small companies will stop turning to the web to promote their business.
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Secondly, if you have people reselling your service or your product and you increase your prices – would you advise them and give them as much lead time as possible to incorporate those changes – or would you not bother telling them.
This is not a gas station. There are a LOT of PT customers who are SEOs and who resell Inktomi services and whose pricing is based on Inktomi fees. Knowing that a price change is about to take place is just a wee bit helpful in marketing their product.
We are receiving daily notices from PT that pages are up for renewal in the next week or two.
Here is one we received today: “Renewing your subscription by 11/28/2001 will assure that your URL(s) are not removed from the Inktomi Index” NOWHERE in the notice that we received today does it state ANYTHING about a price increase.
If a price increase goes into effect on Nov 17 and we renew on Nov 27 – what price will we pay. Haven’t got a clue. They won’t tell us.
Great business ethics.
The additional services provided by Position Tech are a bonus and smart business on the part of PT.
You are not being charged for them and so PT can add and take away as they see fit.
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If they refuse to honor it, they will be in breach of the contract.
The rest is simple business courtesy and if they don't want to provide a professional service, you are right: that's their option.
PT is a re-seller with additional quality services. They do not get the blame or the praise for any of the topics in this forum.
From this point on the open discussion of PT will need to pertain directly to INKTOMI matters. Remember PT is like sears selling you shoes - if the shoes are real bad it's not sears fault (but they may be helpful in getting you a new pair of shoes.
PT is exactly the same - they want you to be a happy customer and are not out to deceive you or leave you in the dark.
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to put it in perspective $25 represents only 250 click throughs at Overture's bottom rate (not that i use them), so if you're paying anyway its good value.
Having only recently realised about the whole pay for inclusion inktomi thing -i've got into it and certainly for my niche market the rapid ranking achieved from msn alone is totally worth it, especially as i previously only got buried or not even listed before in inktomi or at best got a page in that ranked but only after waiting about 3 months (thats 3 months of lost sales)
Anyone have any idea how Inktomi ranking algorhythms work anyway?
Those of us already up the paid-Inktomi learning curve can move up one seo step and garner more traffic for the higher fees. The newbies will have a greater reach for a positive ROI and that will scare a lot of them off.
And who knows ... maybe Ink will play it smart with their extra funds and use some of it to buy us higher positions in MSN, etc. That's what the web is all about ... pay for performance ... if Ink can provide us good traffic for a positive ROI, we'll buy, othewise, we'll tell them to kiss off.
If you make a page loaded with themed content, and hence a myriad of themed keywords, put this on your site and submit it to Inktomi's paid inclusion program, it should draw a surprising amount of Inktomi traffic with no further optimization.
You will not need high rankings on popular keywords. People searching with unusual keyword combinations will find your page.
Our ranking on Inktomi- powered sites for our major keywords is in the 60's, which is pretty useless.
Our page is well-optimised with relevant content and is doing well on other S.E.s, but not Inktomi. That's why I'm wondering what Inktomi is looking for.
I heard that some S.E.s don't like domains that only point to a website. I guess Inktomi doesn't care if its not the actual URL? One way of finding out. That's good to know link popularity isn't a factor.
Any further comments?
However, they are preparing to restrict URL changes to within the domain.
If you try to get paid-inclusion Ink traffic on competitive keywords, you'll be hopelessly buried under the MSN directory pages (expect MSN to be the major source of Ink traffic) which are not fed by Inktomi.
So if you want to make a keyword optimized page, select keyword phrases that have only one or two MSN directory listings before the 'web pages' listings begin. Then you'll have a chance. Luck and competition plays a role here too, so sometimes you'll get good traffic on low competition pages and sometimes you won't.
The other way is to make a high-content page that may have hundreds of relevant, but non-competitive keywords. So if you want to make a real estate sales page, make one that discusses the effects of color and color combinations on curb appeal of houses. Get into the nitty gritty of specific colors and color combinations. Then your page will pop up in the SERP's for someone wanting to buy a "blue house with red shutters", or a "blue abode with curbs". You'll catch all the crazy stuff. But be sure and put something like "Real estate for sale - what colors do you like?" in your title and description so you'll capture the attention of people wanting to buy real estate, not people wanting to buy paint or pour concrete.
If you try something as competitive as real estate in my example above, you'll probably find it worth the time and effort and the cost of Ink inclusion but it's not going to draw a flood of traffic and make you rich all at once.
I already have a good listing on MSN (via Looksmart) but I want to improve my ranking on IWon, About.com, HotBot, etc.
I know these are relatively minor but there seem to be a lot of them so I figured it's worth putting some effort into.
My question really is: are keywords in the URL an important factor in Inktomi's ranking?
Just get your keywords into your title & description
Inktomi has done more to hurt SEOs than any other entity, PT is there partner in crime. Inktomi is irrevocably damaging the search engine landscape with their monetization of what is perceived to be free and true listings. This monetization is a cancer, it is killing seo.
disclaimer:
this is just my opinion, not that of wmw.
I quit hanging out at another forum and came here because the back slapping there got rather sickening.
Search engine specialists are not on the search engines favorites list. We've always been viewed as the enemy. So when they tell us to bend over and be monetarized while they capitalize on our sites, I don't feel we ought to be giving them a big friendly slap on the back.
As they should.
Search engines are not non-profit or social organizations nor are professional SEO's.
In business, backslapping you vendor is done by purchasing their products when they add value. When their product does not or ceases to add value, you don't purchase it.
Simply, this is all about business.
It is your choice, or your vendors choice, to be in the business or not.
I cringe at the thought of $25 a URL. But since I make it back in a few days (multiplied by a year), I'd be an idiot not to use it.
I know, not all web sites are out for a profit, what if some Good Samaritan publishes the cure for cancer, etc… They never had a chance with Inktomi when it was free. What did throwing the same keyword a hundred times on a page have to do with the quality of a site?
It was/is inevitable for search engines to become like the Yellow Pages. But remember that SEO'S started charging clients for placement long before the actual engines did. Do you think that webmasters who refuse to pay an SEO out of “principle” think any different of us? Heck, knowing what I know, I wouldn't pay me!
New pricing has been postponed until November 28, 2001.
Link leads to message
Effective 11/28/01 Pricing for the Search/Submit program will be as follows.URLs 2 - 1,000 - $25.00 each
one way to beat this may be to put all your paid Ink listings in a generic domain before the cut-off date and use folders to define the clients such as:
www.websales.com/CLIENT-A/ProductX/pageXXX.htm
www.websales.com/CLIENT-B/ProductY/pageXXX.htm
Then as your customers or their needs change, the pages remain functional as all you need to do is change folder names. (It's the folder names that help the ranking anyway.)
You will be paying more money to INK for less service from INK - but the above is a good work-around.
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