Inktomi Paid Inclusion vs. Non-Paid

Is there a difference in scoring?

[panic]

Does Inktomi score paid inclusion documents differently than non-paid?

-panic

[seth_wilde]

Nope, other than the indexing schedules they're treating the same...

[jeremy goodrich]

Ditto what Seth said, Inktomi has been spidering agressively & indexing on par, and in some cases, faster than Google. There are a few sites I have right now that receive about 2 or 3 times the traffic from MSN than they do from Google derived sources, however, this is due to the different indexing schedules.

Once they are entrenched in both databases, the Google traffic oustrips MSN stuff by about 2 or 3 to 1, but MSN is certainly a nice jumpstart to the sites these days.

If your site is part of the 'core web map' that you find referenced in some of the literature at Inktomi's web site, you'll understand what you need to do in order to get them to actively spider & list your pages for free.

[heini]

>Does Inktomi score paid inclusion documents differently than non-paid?

What about links, popularity?

[skibum]

The answer from the engines is that they are treated the same. It would seem however that if this was the case, then a TF or PFI page with no incoming links might have a hard time competing against free pages with links. It would also put pay per click pages in the TF programs at a disadvantage, which is of course where revenue comes from.

[heini]

>if this was the case, then a TF or PFI page with no incoming links might have a hard time

Exactly.
Now, search engines algos are pretty complex, taking into account several factors. It is possible to score so high on some factors that a complete loss on other factors wouldn't matter.
To illustrate: Some pages rank high simply on the power of popularity (aka PR), some pages rank high simply on the power of anchor text, some hit home with onpage factors.

Still, it is possible to bring in pages without any backlinks and get them ranking via PFI. Which makes me think there's a slightly modified algo at work, leaving out the computation of popularity.

[Robber]

An observation last week across a site we were working relating to this is that we set up a new site a few weeks ago and we have been waiting for an application to slot into it before we start promoting it. There are NO links to it.

However, Inktomi has managed to pick it up and is ranking it really well for competitive terms. On MSN you obviously have all the other paid results before the "Web pages" results but this site has many top 5 spots in the Web pages section.

This hasn't used PFI but it does look a lot to me like Inktomi is very keen on on page factors and doesnt use off page nearly as much as some others. I guess this would make sense, afterall, they want people to pay for a URL, if the guy sees it go to the top they may buy more urls for inclusion - in that sense it is in their interest to develop an algo that is not dependent on external factors such as incoming links.

[panic]

Just for testing purposes, I took two of our clients who are in the same industry (one very popular, the other one not so popular), and applied the same content to both of them for their homepage. I picked an extremely popular word (within the top 30 according to WordTracker), optimized for it, and added it to our trusted feed.

The more popular client wound up ranking within the top 3 results, while the less popular client ended up ranking somewhere beyond the 500 mark.

Same words, same content, but the only difference was in link popularity.

-panic

[heini]

Very interesting, thanks for doing that test, panic.

[Trodda]

Yes, I concur with your test results, Panic. Our most competitive phrase has moved from #7 to #2 on Ink purely as a result of new links that were attained in the past few months with strong anchor text. We made very few on-page changes during this period.

[heini]

Trodda, it's not a question if INK uses link popularity in some fashion, all major engines have done that for ages. The question specifically is if INK uses link pop to rank PFI pages, which panic's test results seem to indicate.

[panic]

Another interesting note :

I was ranked #3 for a very competitive keyword for the more popular client (mentioned in my previous post to this thread). Everything was fine and dandy for a few days, and seemingly out of nowhere, I dropped to #7 without making any changes to the content.

At first, I thought one of the competitors made changes to their content, but neither of them had a more recent "last updated" date than my listing.

Any idea as to why that may happen?