MSN Free Site Listing

Taking Longer Than Expected

[Hardwood Guy]

It's been at over 30 days for me. I've looked around and it seems I should wait longer for my site to be seen. Also from the stats I've seen in other discussions MSN doesn't rank very high in search hits, but I'm sure that varies with each individual site.

My real question: I'm interested in the pay submission but not paying for each click. Any suggestions on paid submission only, and how long to expect it to be in their index?

Thanks:)
Ken

[Nick_W]

positiontech or ineedhits etc all provide one page PFI for Ink I beleive. About $40 if memory serves...

Nick

[Shakil]

Hardwood Guy,

You may want to look at the Inktomi pfi program via Positiontech.

Or alternatively in the Looksmart program.

However be warned that if your industry/keywords are dominated by PPC, then you will be way down the line for results, unless you are targeting 2-3 word phrases.

Shak

[Grumpus]

Write non-commercial articles, reviews, reports, etc. and submit them to Zeal. Takes some work and practice, but it's free.

G.

[Hardwood Guy]

Thanks Guys:

Yes, two and three word phrases.

[Hardwood Guy]

Wow! I did horribly on the Zeal member quiz. Time for some work there!

[Marcia]

It's good to hunt down those 3 and 4 word phrases that have only a few LS listings and go for those. I do the free Ink submit through Hotbot in the UK.

Zeal's a good idea, but doesn't the site have to be completely non-commercial?

[Shakil]

I do the free Ink submit through Hotbot in the UK.
========================================================

Marica,

What success rate are you seeing with the above method?

(in terms of inclusion only)

Shak

[skibum]

If its still only possible to submit one page (which will be PPC) through Looksmart, it may be best to either create a new page that can target attainable keywords and improve the chance of ranking on those keywords by getting them in the title of the listing or submit an existing internal products or services page that can achieve the same.

Zeal is the other alternative, however, the Zeal system will not permit submissions from "commercial sites". A commercial site seems to be one that has already paid Looksmart for a listing.

[mack]

>> "Wow! I did horribly on the Zeal member quiz. Time for some work there! "

That makes two of us.

[Crazy_Fool]

shakil - i use the hotbot free submit as well. the free submit was removed for a while, but prior to that, every domain i submitted got in ink. since they put the free submit back, i've submitted a few domains and slurp has spidered them but probably not long enough yet to see the sites in SERPs.

[Shakil]

crazy fool, i see where you are coming from with this, however I am confused that these submissions are going to Inktomi as You and Marcia are saying, especially since I have just seen this:

============================================================
You can submit no more than 20 URLs from the same domain in a 24-hour period. If you are working on many different sites with different domains, then you can submit 20 URLs from each one within a 24-hour period.

If you want to submit a whole site, it is not necessary to submit each single page: our spider will follow all hyperlinks (and also links on subsequent pages).

You can find out if HotBot has indexed your site by using the 'Domain' filter option on the Advanced Search page of HotBot. Just type the search term as shown in the example (domain: www.mysite.com) and click on the Search button. HotBot will show your Web site as the result, if it has been indexed already.

HotBot site submission takes normally maximum 30 days.

Note: The Web site is submitted to the HotBot Web Search Index, which is powered by Fast.
============================================================

so who is HotBot in bed with: Inktomi or FAST?

Shak

[Crazy_Fool]

now that's a very interesting find ....

it's been a long time now, but i'm sure the old free submit was always to inktomi. the webmaster FAQs say the same thing - powered by FAST.

the FAQs also look just like the old FAQs for when it was ink - same old 20 URLs per 24 hours, can't do framed sites etc etc ...

and the very interesting thing in the FAQs .....

How do I prevent HotBot from crawling my site?
A robots.txt file removes pages from HotBot. You can place this file on your site to tell search robots which directories they should add to their databases and which ones they shouldn't index.
If you don't want HotBot to index your site, ask your webmaster to create a robots.txt file for your site. HotBot's crawler will fetch and obey this command file. It will obey any entry with a user agent of "*" or which contains the word "Slurp" (the name of HotBot's crawler).

so, since when have FAST had a spider called slurp?!?! :)

oh, and when you run a search on hotbot uk, it says at the bottom "powered by inktomi" .....

personally i think hotbot is an after school project and the mention of FAST comes from someone at Lycos which is powered by FAST.

[rfgdxm1]

>Zeal's a good idea, but doesn't the site have to be completely non-commercial?

Nope Marcia. And, I'm not only a Zealot, but at the Expert Zealot level, which is the highest. The way it works is this. If you own widgets.com, and that site sells widgets, you can't submit widgets.com itself. However, if you put at widgets.com/widgets-safety.htm a page all about the safe use of widgets, so long as that page doesn't also sell widgets on the page, this *is* allowable. You are however allowed to have on that page a "Back to widgets.com homepage", which of course you hope people will click on.

Only problem is that some Zealot or editor may be very leery about a commercial deep link. Thus, best to be as subtle about the page having any true commercial intent as possible.

[steveb]

What Grumpus said, but don't submit your main page to Looksmart or you won't be able to submit the deeplinks yourself (a high Zealot can).

Zeal is awesome and can provide lots of traffic, but only from the title and exact description you submit. Looksmart gets you one single page title, decription and a few keywords, while Zeal can get you many pages and descriptions. In competitive areas the Ink backfill is 100+ results down and worthless, but its cheap so a no-brainer thing to do.

[steveb]

"It's been at over 30 days for me."

Looking at this again, Zeal lists things in a few days to a couple weeks (in my experience), longer over the holidays. You should be searching the Zeal directory...........

but wait, you just took the Zeal quiz? How did you make an MSN free submit a month ago then? Looksmart you have to pay, Zeal you have to pass the quiz... what else is there (not counting Ink)?

[rfgdxm1]

>but wait, you just took the Zeal quiz? How did you make an MSN free submit a month ago then? Looksmart you have to pay, Zeal you have to pass the quiz... what else is there (not counting Ink)?

Actually, if you happen to know someone who is a Zealot, you can always try begging a favor and ask them to submit it for you.

[coconutz]

>>How did you make an MSN free submit a month ago then? Looksmart you have to pay, Zeal you have to pass the quiz... what else is there (not counting Ink)?

Others have used this thinking it submits direct to MSN due to the title of the page: free.submit-it.com/msnsubmit.htm

[edited by: Laisha at 6:24 pm (utc) on Jan. 6, 2003]
[edit reason] delinkified [/edit]

[Hardwood Guy]

I guess I didn't. That's the submission place I used alright. Oh well. Thanks for that tip!

[Powdork]

Hello
I'm having a problem mebbe you guys can help me with, or mebbe I'm not. I have a new (to me) site which when I bought it had a free zeal listing which turns into a huge chunk of business via MSN. My site is a widget directory. The former site was to sell a book about widgets. The problem lies in that when people search for widgets by name my site shows up prominently with the Zeal description. This in and of itself doesn't bother me because the visitors entering this way stay at least as long as others. Now, however, the slurped results are also showing up on MSN which includes my current description etc. Will MSN or Zeal realize this and drop my free listing? Or, more likely, what will happen if the competition complains to someone at Zeal or MSN?

Thanks, Powdork

[edited by: Laisha at 4:45 pm (utc) on Jan. 12, 2003]
[edit reason] Removed solicitation of bribery [/edit]

[stechert]

See the following pages for Looksmart's policies on editing and/or removing sites.

[zeal.com...]
[zeal.com...]
[zeal.com...]

Cheers,
Andre