Let's look at INK's "pay to play" plan

thread about your experience with inks new inclusion for $$$

[stcrim]

This thread is for posting your experiences with the new INK and POSITIONTECH "pay to play" plan. Let's take an honest look at what's happened up to this point and what (if any) potential there is. Feel free to tell the good the bad and the ugly.

I have subscribed 5 pages, 1 was 4 days ago and the others were 3 days ago. None have been spidered by INK or included in any database.

So much for promise #1 about getting into the database in 48 hours. Will let you know when they to get in

[tigger]

makemetop.

must be the luck of the Irish :). I've just checked agian and so far (hopefully) of the 4 sites I've now submitted through PT the first one is the only site to be indexed by hotbot.co.uk, is it that perhaps hotbot hasn,t refreshed it's database

[jilly]

Here's a question:

My listings are updated every 48 hours if I paid for them, right? How often are the actual databases of the partners updated as my listing is definitely not being updated every 48-72 hours. I have done some testing and this is not happening. Tweaking minds want to know!!

Jill

[tigger]

Jilly

I feel that's the only grey area within its service and you'll probably find that both ink and pt would come back with, "the fee is only for inclusion within our database and it is completely out of our controll how often this information is refreshed by our various partners" (just a guess).

I'm finding hotbot is the slowest so far, closely followed by AOL, top of the list is canada/anzwers and freeserve then UKMax

[Chris999]

I submitted to Pos Tech nn Thurs., was spidered by Pos Tech on Fri., was spidered by Inktomi on Sat and showed up in MSN, HB, Looksmart, Goto on Sun. Still waiting on AOL. No problem with cloaking or doorways pages.

[cyberbear]

I submitted the index page of three different domains on Nov17 and all where included in most Ink portals within 24 hours and all within 48 hours. Am seeing a boost in rankings. Now that I have paid for this listing, which algorith is it that I have to worry about? Is this the algorith that Ink had before they started their campaign for Paid Listings? I will tweak one of the pages today and see if I nab some more traffic. Anyone have any idea of the algorith at present? Thanks.

[yanton]

RE: any actual success/sales from paid service

One of my clients is smilin' wide. They retail quality kids toys and before using my services sold barely anything, but Ink is sending sales their way. A good investment for $20 with results coming through Lycos.

[stcrim]

yanton,

Lycos??? Could you mean Hotbot/lycos???

[Chris999]

Does anyone know if Ink is favoring root URL's. in its ranking algorithm. I ask because I submitted a root URL on my first go round with pay-to-play and it did well. Now I am wondering if I should submit URL's from the the same domain or set up another domain.

[tigger]

Chris.

I've submitted a mix of both root and doorways both are ranking well, although now that goto is in bed with freeserve most of those rankings have now fallin to the secound page :(

[cyberbear]

Anyone else noticed this. I submitted 3 of my domain home pages to Position Tech and now additional pages are being indexed on their own from these three domains. It seems Slurp is picking up a few extra pages per domain submitted. I can only hope that they pick up the rest. In addition, I have noticed that even after I have tweaked the original page submissions to PT they are still showing the original submission in addition to the new one. That is , 2 pages for each homepage, original and tweaked one. Also, one domain which is in Looksmart is showing 300 pages indexed on Hotbot and Iwon.Just wondering if anyone else is seeing Slurp crawl and add new submissions on their own lately. Hope everybody has a great day.

[Billythekid]

My site is getting referals again since I paid. About the same positioning and keywords as it was before it was burried. MSN mostly.

[tedster]

I'm experimenting with a few paid pages in Inkotmi. I feel like I need a good handle on this before I ask clients to open their wallets.

Here's the weird thing. I'm seeing traffic increases, and some ranking jumps, even though the results show an 11/15 update, and I only paid PositionTech on 11/27.

MSN traffic has almost doubled on one site, but the site hasn't budged from number 78! All the extra traffic is coming from those strange "fallthrough-true" referrals I mentioned in another thread [webmasterworld.com].

Also, another site popped from 30 to 14 on Canada, but Canada is still showing the old spidering date as well.

It's like some kind of weird magic. I like the traffic. But it's extremely confusing to understand if it is dependent on the paid inclusion/spidering, which does continue pretty much as promised.

I end up with two questions:
1. How can I tell when the results of a tweak are reflected in the rank?

2. Which Inktomi partner or combination of partners is the sanest place to watch?

[stcrim]

Tedster,

1. I always make a tiny change in the description such as ending it in ... then ,,, then back again. Let's me know quickly which page in in force for paid results

2.because MSN generate so much more traffic - that's th one we use to keep a finger on the pulse of INK...

[tedster]

Thanks for the idea, Steve. That's a handy trick with the description.

However, MSN uses the LookSmart description for sites that are in LookSmart! It will work for HotBot or Canada. Guess I should keep a composite watch on Ink, anyway.

[stcrim]

tedster,

I am only talking about the paid submissions here - and that description is the one on the page in your meta tags. It changes if you change it for each spidering by PT/INK. Our paid pages may eventually end up in differnet SE DB's but for now, we have built those pages for and submitted them only to PT/INK for this testing phase...

[mivox]

So... everyone says their paid submissions showed up in Ink's partner sites almost immediately... I've got free listings in inktomi, but MSN and Canada still have no listing for my site.

Are Ink's partners somehow only updating the paid submissions? That would be rather sinister...

[stcrim]

mivox,

My experience is that the free submissions are currently a waste of time - an though the jury is still out, I'm not real happy with the paid ones either. I'm gonna have to see some stability before parting with any more $$$ for INK's Pay to Play Plan...

[msgraph]

>Are Ink's partners somehow only updating the paid submissions? That would be rather sinister<

If you see Slurp.si visit your site (non-PT submission) on a regular basis and make some changes, you should see your site updated within a week or two. When I say make changes, I mean major word and link text replacement. Would be hard for non-doorway page users to acheive without ruining site structure. This usually explains why a lot of sites/pages tend to get dropped if they are not modified often. And why doorway pages fair better than regular sites.

[Ross]

>Would be hard for non-doorway page users to acheive without ruining site structure.
>This usually explains why a lot of sites/pages tend to get dropped if they are not modified often.
>And why doorway pages fair better than regular sites.

Hi Msgraph,

I'm sure that you're right about the doorway pages, but have a feeling that it's not the whole story. I paid to have a doorway page spidered on a spare domain intially, and although it wasn't totally buried, it was in the 70's and going nowhere (no link pop....no themes....no nothing !!). Looking through a search on one of my keywords, I could see that in the top 100 sites, there were only 11 individual pages, rather than domains appearing. Furthermore the highest ranked single page was at position 31, with the next at pos 55.
I then registered the same doorway, this time copied as index.htm. It initially did well (top 20), but has now faded into oblivion (out of top 100), but again no link pop, no themes, no chance.
However...the main site, pointed to by said doorway has risen from the grave, and is now number 3 of 79,220. It's a good site, with good link pop, lots of pages etc, but prior to paying P.T. for spidering a different URL it was languishing down near Davy Jones locker.

I don't pretend to understand what's going on. P.T. have said that INK will only spider paid for pages in the Pay to Play scheme, and that they would not follow links, yet I haven't paid for them to spider the main site, it has simply reappeared near the top of the rankings.

Any ideas wise owls ??. I'm certainly not complaining, I just wish that I understood just a little better exactly what is going on.

[msgraph]

I've "doorwayed"(root and sub-page) up to the top 10 on all Inktomi partners except for Hotbot.(Still talking about free submission here) The only reason I can't top Hotbot is from link pop, Dmoz, or Direct Hit. Other than Hotbot, I run into no problems from sites with high link pop. in the other Ink partner sites.

I too have had PT pages knocked down by spam doorways, so I don't think PT submitted pages give you a priority over free sites. The only thing PT is providing you is guaranteed listing for a year. Not a better chance at getting ranked.

[stcrim]

Please continue your posting for this thread here: [webmasterworld.com...]

If you are signed up for mail nitification, please do so in that thread -

Thanks
Steve