Ink time frame: submit to live

[JamesR]

-taken by Positiontech spider Nov. 1 14:47
-Ink spiders visited Nov. 2 2:00
-First confirmed Ink referrer Nov. 2 20:26

Total of a around 30 hours until live. Looks like the Ink partners all updated at the same time unless this was a fluke or coincidence (probably not since they promise 48 hours). Could not remember exact time I submitted to Positiontech but not too much before the spider showed up.

[Rockintom]

Here's the million dollar question: are the pages buried, or do they seem to be using the old algo?

[jilly]

James:

How long before the spider hits after your requesting service? What is the IP of the spider or referer we're looking for, if you know?

Thanks
Jill

[JamesR]

Not buried, same old algo. No boost either as far as I can tell.

Positiontech grabber IP 199.177.18.9
Slurp/si 216.35.103.81
Slurp/cat 209.185.141.249

[Brett_Tabke]

Thank you for the report James.

So, why does there seem to be an extra step in there? Why does PT grab your page before Ink? Just to verify it is reachable?

[JamesR]

Brett, yeah they have a status page you can view after you submit. It gives the URL, a word count meter (what that is for I don't know) that indicates whether your word count is good, medium, poor, or not processed. Then the status of your URLs which seem to be a bit behind real time. This does help eleviate the fear of not knowing what is going on. Seems like they are just trying to ensure everything goes into their system, maybe to tighten up communication with Ink. Maybe Ink is subcontracting out certain technology they consider is too expensive for them, I don't know, why else would they have this third party doing the tech work?

[tigger]

has anyone found out yet whether doorways are acceptable ?

[DrCool]

The extra step where Position Tech grabs the site could just be a verification of some sort. They are probably just making sure the site is there and you have submitted a valid URL and not mis-typed anything. Just one of many possibilities.

[jilly]

tigger:

From what I read you could submit them if you want to pay the price, but they have to be content rich or don't count on them getting listed or staying that way.

Jill

[bluesriff]

Tigger and all,

I bought in for the heck of it and threw out a pretty much self sufficient doorway just to see what happens. If it doesn't stick or rank well, I'm just going to fool with it till it does. I'll keep y'all posted.

[redzone]

Results of my "paid for" test.
I wanted to select keyword phrases that were moderately -> extremely competitive.

I opened the account 11/01, all keywords were crawled 11/02, and indexed on 11/03.

The signifigant thing to note, is that all keywords were indexed in AOL and Hotbot.. I've noticed an up to 2 week lag time at AOL previously.

Here are the results: (Nobody be poking any fun at me) :)

Keyword Phrase Hotbot AOL iWon

home equity loan rates 14 12 13
2nd mortgage 10 9 8
home equity loans 62 56 54
home equity mortgage 80 79 71
home improvement loan 14 13 12
second mortgage 37 34 32

ifind.freeserve.com and MSN do not cluster results, and these keyword phrases are heavily spammed by a couple of domains, so I was buried on those two portals..

Note: On the hotbot rankings, the ranking shown is "NOT" inclusive of the DH listings, but is inclusive if there are any "DMOZ" listings... So a #14 on HB, is actually #24, because of the DH listings on the first page, but I wanted to show relation between the three portals, using "strictly" Inktomi rankings.

Time to tune a bit, and let my "paid" subscription do it's work.. I'll update the group as I tune, and get re-crawled, re-ranked.....

[stcrim]

redzone

Thank you for that update. I'll look forward to the next one. Are the pages you have in the INK's "pay or get buried" plan traditional doorway pages? Themed pages? Cloaked? Anything you can share?

Steve

[Brett_Tabke]

>Nobody be poking any fun at me

Ha, those are some great rankings for such competitive kw's. I just looked at some of those searches - wow, stiff corporate competition.

Appreciate the update.

Check out this relevance: #13 on hotbot under Home improvement loan:
13. PointCom.com - Keyword Search Didn't find it? Try a search on these popular categories.
Superscope is your psychic connection to the Internet fortune telling tools of Tarot, Astrology, Runes, I Ching and Numerology.
10/8/2000

One aspect, that I am not clear on is how often can you resubmit?

>"pay or get buried"

Was that line in GodFather 1, or 2?

[jilly]

Let me try this question again...
How long before the spider hits after your requesting service? What is the IP of the spider or referer we're looking for? Sorry if this is covered but I signed up one site just for the hell of it and it has been 48 hours and I can see no listing or spider activity yet.

I checked my information with them and it still lists the site as holding for authorization. Not sure what that means and I can't seem to find out from them. Any ideas?

[redzone]

Jilly,

Position Tech's crawler came right away on 11/01/2000:

IP -> 199.177.18.9
name -> thinkpad600
UA -> Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Win32)

They passed the root domain of our test submission as the referrer, so they ended up in our referrer logs, and not our noreferrer logs.

Slurp showed up early on 11/02/2000:

IP Class C Range -> 209.185.141
UA -> Slurp/cat ([e-mail]; [inktomi.com...]

Steve,

They are doorways, themed, and IP-delivered.... :)

Brett,
Going to throw the root at them, and see if we get a relevance boost. Will probably target "mortgage rates" on the root, can't get any more competitive than that. And thanks for not "ho-ho'ing" at the "home equity loans" ranking.. :) All of the test URL's so far have been "sub-pages"....

The URL's have been crawled by the same Slurp UA and IP, every 24 hours... Need to get busy, and tune a bit?

Edited by: redzone

[NFFC]

>Time to tune a bit, and let my "paid" subscription do it's work

RZ,the $64,000 dollar question [well $20 at least], if you had submitted those pages last week, before "pay to play", do you think you would have achieved the same rankings?

[added]
>name -> thinkpad600
Are they running the whole operation from a laptop!

[stcrim]

>>>Was that line in GodFather 1, or 2?

Both!!!

In my best Brando - INKTOMI is our family, so you'll pay, or take a swim with the fishes. How long can you hold your breath down there, huh? It's an easy choice, don't you think - end Brando -

[redzone]

NFFC:
Not a chance on obtaining those listings standing in line for the "freebie", much less getting Ink to crawl everything submitted through the portal entry ways... :)

I used our standard page formats that were doing well in June... :)

What does that tell everyone?

[jilly]

Thanks for the info, redzone. I still don't see any evidence of them hitting the site in our logs. What would it mean if they have Hold for Authorization under the "status" section? auth from who? my CC or Inktomi or what? It has been over 48 hours and they haven't answered our questions via email. This is not an adult site, but it is FOR adults - we sell lingerie via an online store and have been for over 4 years, so I doubt it's content related.

Jill

[littleman]

JamesR and Redzone, thank you for the detailed reporting. From what you said it looks like this pay for crawling program is really pay for algo inclusion.

Jilly, please keep us informed.

[NFFC]

>What does that tell everyone?

Stinktomi?

[tigger]

redzone.

is your site showing on the other ink partners ?, I have a client that is very keen to get rankings on anzwers/canada and where his site is quite small the fee would only be around $100

[redzone]

Jilly,
Not sure what the "Auth Pending" means, ours all say, Spidered... I'd call them if I were you...

As for Canada/Anzwers, both the portals, only list domains for their respective countries, in the default searches.. The user has to change the radio button, and select, "all the web", to get the Non-.ca/.au listings.. So I don't even bother with them, as we don't have .ca/.au domains..

[NFFC]

Don't know whether it is an IP thing, but canada.com defaults to "all the web" for me.

[gil]

I bit the bullet and submitted three 'Test' pages to PositionTech on Nov.2. The pages showed up in MSN this morning (Nov. 5) and partially in some of the other portals I checked.
Just like the old days with Canada and Anzwers.....Ha.

For a small enterprise with a limited number of pages to list this is not a bad deal, if they do in fact provide the 48 hr spidering and guaranteed inclusion for a year. Thats one hell of alot of advertising for $40.00.

Time will tell how well INK and PositionTech coordinate this effort to insure customer satisfaction and the next big question as Steve has pointed out.....will the portals stick with INK?

As the number of WWW pages increases expoentially over the next year I would imagine some form of this 'pay or else' scheme will become quite common. Hope I'm wrong on this one.

Gil

[jilly]

Does anyone have an email address to contact these people when there is a problem? I've gone over my information and I can't find anything and the one's I've tried are not being answered.

Thanks!

[tedster]

littleman:
>>...it looks like this pay for crawling program is really pay for algo inclusion.<<

gil:
>>if they do in fact provide the 48 hr spidering and guaranteed inclusion for a year. Thats one hell of alot of advertising for $40.00.<<

For me, these two remarks summarize the issue. If $20 can get one page for a client in a good position, even for one kw, then that beats GoTo's deal by a whole lot. It's just that with GoTo there is no algorithm roulette.

I still don't like it. However, I'm also not trying to run a financially viable search engine service, and someone certainly has to pay the bills.

It will be fascinating to see how this chapter in the history of the web gets written. I still hope that little guys and not-for-profits don't get lost in this pay-to-play stampede. A big part of the web's potential would be lost.

[stcrim]

tedster,

For every $25 we spend at GOTO I net 10 times that. We are penny players at GOTO, but with thousands of pages that traffic adds up.

If I was selling baked apples, I would have a hundred different pages for a hundred different baked apple terms. On GOTO my $25 buys me as many terms as I want to bid on. With the new INK plan it buys me one page with some change left over.

Now, If I could get the same 10 fold return from INK, that would be a wonderful investment. But - because GOTO delivers 40 results (first page) at a time I am almost always on the first page even with my penny bids and competitive terms. Since most INK portals deliver something besides INK first and usually only 10 results, the chances of being on the first or even second page are not very good. And all that depends on cracking the algorithm and doing it better than your competition. And INK's current portals sticking with them.

When GOTO added AOL to the mix my GOTO traffic soared. Don't mean to turn this into a GOTO thread, but for my money they are great. There are several very important points to making GOTO a success - the main one being a winning and powerful description.

With that said, I'm now going to test Google's new ad program using the GOTO methods and see what happens. But INK's "pay or be buried" not yet...

[tedster]

steve,

All good points, and they're all in the mix. But I've also found that we can go through $25 pretty darned fast on GoTo, and the Ink fee is for a year.

With one client, for instance, $100 a month for about 20 terms is common. For another, $25 lasts 3 months for 20 terms -- it all depends. I don't have any really heavy-hitters, mostly penny players.

So the fact that the Inktomi fee goes for a full year may even things out a little bit. But as you mentioned, the deal is cracking the algo -- and I don't know if I'm up to that or not. I though I had a decent handle until June or so, and then everything went in the hopper!

[bluesriff]

Update on the doorway page attempt:

THINKPAD600 - - [03/Nov/2000:03:11:05 -0500]

("THINKPAD" is the Posiontech spider I presume?)

j6002.inktomi.com - - [03/Nov/2000:11:22:45 -0500]

j6002.inktomi.com - - [04/Nov/2000:09:06:25 -0500]

j6002.inktomi.com - - [05/Nov/2000:09:07:57 -0500]

And at this point still not into the database.