Do you pay to get in Ink?

My annual fee has expired

[mikeD]

I paid for my site home page to have express submission to Inktomi. This annual 48hrs express submission fee has just expired and they want me to pay again. Should I or not. I have never really paid much attention to Inktomi and haven't a clue how it crawls or works.

[mayor]

MikeD, if you've registered that page through PositionTech you can go there and get good statistics on how well that page performed in regards to getting traffic. That should help you decide. If you registered elsewhere, I can't help.

I wouldn't count on a page that has been paid for (monetized) getting into the Inktomi (and therefore MSN) search results anytime soon if you decide not to renew.

[seth_wilde]

I'll second what Mayor said, look at your PT stats if possible. On top of that, If you do stop paying you'll probably be missing from Ink for at least a month+ (while waiting for the free spider).

[dazz]

i have that decision coming up pretty soon too. i think ill renew mine as its only what $39? per year. with about 3 months left for the year ive had just over 1000 hits...dont know if that is good or not for inktomi but over the year it will probably work out about $0.03 per click.

[mayor]

You know the value of a click to your site better than anyone else here, so you have to decide. $.03 per click is hard to go wrong with, especially if it's just one page were talking about. It's nice to have a page you can play with in regard to Inktomi optimization if nothing else.

If you're already a Postion Tech subscriber, the renewal might only cost you $25. They haven't been trying to hose me $39 for a renewal, just $25. For comparison, I tried Verisign but they tried to gouge me with a $39 first-page fee every time I started a subscription session, so stay away from them.

[mikeD]

Cant say I've every had much traffic from an Ink listing, but with Yahoo buying them up it's hard to know what to do. £30 pounds isn't much, but I can't be bothered to just throw it away.

[mayor]

So true, mikeD, at least for many folks.

But I wouldn't steer anyone away from having a single page in there, just to play with.

[webdiversity]

£30 pounds isn't much, but I can't be bothered to just throw it away.

Whoever is charging you £30 is fleecing you. Inktomi subs should be the same price. Webwurld charge in £ but also add VAT, which makes a difference. It pays to watch the exchange rate. It's also important to pay for the best interface for reporting and Position Tech. win that battle hands down in my opinion, it's a shame I can't move all of our submissions into there.

If you take it that an Inktomi submission costs $25 then it works out at 7 cents a day for the subscription. At that sort of price the decision is not that difficult.

1000 visitors must translate into something, otherwise what purpose does the site serve?

[mayor]

webdiversity >> it works out at 7 cents a day for the subscription

Not trying to be argumentative at all, but you're basing that number of 364 days. Something about my PFI pages that a whole bunch of them dropped to the bottom of the SERPs barrel a few months into the subscription, essentially booting them from the program, and on another site some free pages on a site with paid pages suddenly vanished from their index never to return. So I'm saying the ROI accounting for Ink PFI pages isn't nearly as simple as the first look would show.

IMHO playing the Ink PFI card is a lot like playing the slots at Las Vegas ... sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, it's a game of chance. I wouldn't use my rent money to pay for Ink PFI subscriptions, but I do play the game with my pocket change.

[gsmitchell]

I would definitly recommend renewing your paid listing. We have no idea what is going to happen to INK and Yahoo and for the renewal cost of $25-$30 per url I can't think of a better ROI if you get any traffic from it. I need hits also gives a detailed breakdown of the hits you received as well as the average rank for that search term.