Site #1 in Ink for Main KW Phrase. No Subs Listed.

Must I Pay to Play?

[caveman]

The main ecommerce site we manage is #1 in Ink Pure Search Results...although only #7 in M$N now.

Perhaps more importantly, while our homepage does pretty well in INK as noted above, our sub pages, which produce most of our G**gle traffic, are essentially nowhere to be found in Ink.

--Is it really because we only paid for the homepage to be included in Ink (and not the subs)?

--Must I now pay for all of the subs if I want to see them appear in the Ink Partner SERP's? (There are hundreds.)

--What if we pay for just the 5 most important - will they start appearing, but not the other subs?

--If I pay for a few subs, will that have any positive effect on the subs that are not paid for, if most of the subs are linked?

I have a few hundred more questions, but I'll just stick to these for now. ;-)

TIA,
caveman

[glengara]

Most people will suggest you pay, in that there is little "security of tenure" for the free listings.
I'm holding out for now....... ;-)

[Marcia]

Here's a bit of trivia that may or may not be helpful.

I've got two pages out there on different sites that are ranking for the same 3-word keyword phrase. One is #3 and the other is #4. One has a December date at HotBot - that site has several good links to it, probably about 6 or 7 is all. The other has only one single link to it and has a date back from last April.

That second site is just now really being developed and my thought is to get some nice inbound links from sites already in Ink to see if that'll help in generating a little more current activity.

Neither site has any paid pages, and for the first one that does have some good links it does seem that new pages do get included, though slowly.

This info may or may not be helpful, but it can't hurt to look at it is a possibility.

As far as paying goes, for a site that already has a paid page I'd personally do more, though not too many. I'm working on a new site that definitely needs some quick exposure, and regardless of the questions that arise on whether sites that have paid pages still get the rest of the site crawled for free, I'll still do some paid pages for the important phrases to give the site a jumpstart it wouldn't otherwise get. It has only one inbound link right now (ODP) with 2 more added this week, and it will just take too long unless there are some paid inclusions done. Same with another new site - no links yet, it needs PFI.

For a site just starting out, if time is important (which it usually is) IMHO it does pay to get the quickest inclusion possible and then just reconsider when it's time for renewal. Besides, the frequent crawling gives an opportunity to work with tweaking the pages and seeing results ASAP.

[caveman]

Thanks. Having spent some days staring at Ink/M$N, some of the general biases of Ink/M$ seem to be coming into focus (as far as individual page rankings go), but other aspects of these SERP's are still quite baffling to me.

As one example, I have two sites for which I pay to have the homepage included. Both have been in the PFI program for over a year...I just never paid much attention to it until now.

For one, the index page does very well on a big two word money phrase, but the important subs are MIA. For the other, all the important sub pages do well, but the index page is MIA, unless I search for the filename or for odd phrases unique to the page. The site structures are quite similar, and the sites are in related but different categories.

Haven't sorted it out yet, but there seem to be anomolies everywhere I look in Ink.

[glengara]

On a "historical" note, for a site that was well linked (links from pages in the Ink index, DMOZ, etc.) you could stop the PFI, drop out of the index for a while, and then get spidered and re-included with many more pages.

Whether that would still work........

[caveman]

glengara, I presume you are 'holding out' in order to see how Y! handles the INK index (assuming that's the direction they take), before you make any decisions?

[makemetop]

It does take an age for INK to pick up all sub-pages. My methodology has been to put in the top 10-100 money making pages in and ensure there is a good linking strategy to the rest of the pages. I pay for INK spider fodder links such as Yahoo and after a year I usually find that all pages have been indexed and I drop PFI if there is no frequent changes to the pages. All rankings remain pretty much unchanged.

This method is still working as I write.

[glengara]

Yeah, Caveman, waiting to see how Y! handles Ink.

On the MSN thing, a page that's no.3 in Ink (Positiontech) is down to 31 in MSN but up to 1 in MSN UK.
Site is hosted in Ireland and has some regional content, but the US centric filter seems set high at MSN.

[caveman]

Probably good advice to wait and see how Y! handles Ink, especially since in some respects we're doing well on Ink and M$ anyway.

The site I mentioned in the first post of this thread, which was #1 on Ink Pure Search but only #7 on M$, just popped up to #1 on M$ today. No idea why. Better that than the other way around, however! (On G, it has been the opposite ever since FL.)

IMHO, content isn't king...diversification is!

:-)

[kanetrain]

MSN results are the same as pure search, but they often lag by a day or two. So you'll see changes at inktomi first at search.positiontech.com and then later over at msn.

[howiejs]

My biggest problem is getting my sub-pages picked up. I have PFI for the home page. Ink has picked up maybe 10 pages (vs. 1,100 on G!).

The rankings for the 10 pages are all top 5 - but no matter what I do - I can't seem to get Ink to pay attention to my other sub pages

Anyone here have 500+ pages in Ink? (not PFI)