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On my sites that are in Inktomi's BOW, but not in ODP, Inktomi is using the site's title and description tags.
On sites that are also in ODP, Inktomi is using the ODP title and description for the home page listings... but these home pages are ranking as if they had their original titles. It's almost as if Inktomi, in addition to pulling from ODP, is spidering the home page and factoring that in, much as AOL used to do.
On the interior pages of sites that are in ODP, Inktomi is returning the titles and meta descriptions that are on those pages. I'm liking the Inktomi rankings... The interior pages are being ranked for their on-page content, without the big fall-off for some interior pages that I sometimes see in Google.
It took a long while for some of these pages to get into Inktomi, but, apart from that, I'm quite content with what I see, particularly as the LookSmart listings on MSN are disappearing and the Inktomi results are getting to the top.
I've got one paid that's still showing the actual title, maybe it's too new to ODP to show theirs yet.
That's probably always true. In this case, though, to repeat what I'm finding most intriguing...
...these home pages are ranking as if they had their original titles. It's almost as if Inktomi, in addition to pulling from ODP, is spidering the home page and factoring that in, much as AOL used to do.
I've just checked it on a couple of other sites, and I can't believe they'd be ranking as they are if my original titles were being disregarded. I'm curious whether others are seeing this too. If so, it's good news.
A couple of sites in Ink (unpaid) also in ODP are buried for most relevant search terms, but both are doing fine for the keywords that are on the pages and ALSO in the words used in the ODP categories. So that category name appears to have some possible bearing - maybe, it's far too limited to tell. But it makes sense, since what's on the pages would have been used to determine the category the editors put them into in the first place. Most likely on-page criteria are not being used, rather the ODP data is.
Two other sites (one I work on, one not) I'm looking at are paid and also in ODP and their given titles and descriptions are being used, not the ODP ones.
So for unpaid it appears that what's in the title and description have no bearing, as opposed to what's being seen for paid pages. Can we conclude then that in these cases the paid pages are experiencing a decided edge over unpaid?
What's confusing is that it doesn't seem to be universally applied.
This is a nice easy and cheap way to keep new quality content inside the db. Now that LS doesn't maintain their directory it makes sense that Inktomi would go hunting elsewhere for a shortcut.
If that's what you're seeing, then they are being inconsistent.
Just thinking about the last site I checked... the ranking couldn't possibly be coming from the ODP category or title. While the phrase is in my description, many sites with lower ranking have it in their descriptions much more prominently. Also, the ranking is pretty much what it was before the ODP titles and descriptions were adopted. So, I'm tending to attribute the ranking to the original title and what's on the page... and only peripherally to ODP data.
What I find intresting is how they choose when to switch from on-page title to ODP, it is not every site. I think title length and repetition are factors.
If you have a strong page that also happens to have a good ODP listing, I think you see some definite improvements in your Ink listings.
[webmasterworld.com...]
I was looking at some of our free pages in Ink (using Pure Search and MSN) and noticed that the descriptions are taken from the page text instead of the meta description like our PFI page. Is this something new?
This prompted me to take a further look... and what I'm seeing (and this sounds vaguely familiar, like it's already been discussed before somewhere else) is that sites that don't have ODP listings seem to be getting the snippet treatment. Internal pages (not linked to in ODP) also seem to be getting snippets.
