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They say
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What do I get?
1.Fast 48 Hour, inclusion into the Inktomi index.
2.Your Web Page will also be refreshed every 48 hours.
3.Inclusion for 12 months.
4.Click-through reporting. Showing how many visitors have hit your Web Page.
How much does it cost?
1st URL: $30
URLs 2-20: $15
URLs 21-1000: $12
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This seEms different from Position Tech's Service and cheaper I believe. Any comments advice please?
Last i looked at PT, the prices were cheaper.
1st url = $30
2nd url = $12
3rd url = $8
Though it may have changed since then.
Have you seen the 'beta' version of the 'clicks' facility on PT's login page?
It gives the number of referals for a given time period, search term used etc. Unfortunately, it doesn't tell you which Ink partner is sending the referals.
At last, a bit of 'added value' from a PFP service! Very useful, hope it stays and gets developed.
I think you will find its MSN; the search term used information is quite handy, for pulling out search phrases that you didn’t think of.
Lawman
Apparently all of Inktomi's paid inclusion partners will offer the same exact beta click-thru information.
the only real difference will be in customer support.
Which, in my case, would cause me to look further than PT.
Since I have some Ink paid submits coming up, probably next month, I've been giving this some thought.
PT was the first, and there's a tendency to get into a comfort zone with it because of length of time and familiarity with "the name." Same thing like when we think of a certain dessert product we think of Jello - even though there are other brands of gelatin dessert, including generics, equally as good. Same thing with "xeroxing" something when we'll actually be photocopying it. A marketing book I once read dealt with this factor of brand-name identification happening with a company only by virtue of them being the first.
This process of identification happened with a certain software company, now on many people's "love to hate" list, who developed a corner on most of the PC market, probably crowding out and obscuring many other developers and products that were equally as good, but didn't have the vast marketing and publicity resources. Not that they lacked capability and serviceability for the consumer; what they lacked was clout. They were unable to compete. Emacs are synonymous with Apple - but why should PC be synonymous with windows. It's a type of a computer - a personal computer, perfectly capable of running ms-less, as a thread here at the board started by littleman clearly states.
I almost fell into a trap recently because, having studied programming many moons ago, VBasic seems easier than Perl. However, not intending to be the Norma Rae of the internet, and knowing that my one lone decision has little, if any impact at all, there are principles involved - those of not partaking in creating or adding to a power-thirsty, monolithic structure where the free market and opportunity are stifled by virtue of an unequal balance of power.
I'm thinking that when the market share is tipped way out of balance in the direction of one provider, of anything whatsoever, it can lead to them having a disproportionate amount of raw power by reason of size, and eventually becoming less and less responsive to the needs of the consumer, as well as causing competitors possibly more worthy of patronizing to be literally starved out of existence.
My few bucks doesn't count for much by itself, but I've personally made the choice not to be part of contrubuting to what I see as part of a problem. It's bad enough that the playing field is being narrowed down enough to threaten exclusion of those not "moneyed" enough from competing in the open market through being able to have search engine listings. There's room for both systems. And look at those folding - it's narrowing further, to where even competitive opportunity is being destroyed, with the power headed straight into the hands of a few who, unfortunately, would have too much power over our lives to be comfortable.
I'd rather be part of an attempt in the direction of a solution, even if it's never actualized, by making my choices based on reasoning and logic, rather than as a result of having my thinking biased and fixed because of effective marketing and name-recognition. One voice isn't heard much, but in thinking about this, with other companies springing up, my decision is not to slip into herd mentality, but to check all of the options out.
littleman was only one voice in this thread [webmasterworld.com], making nothing more than a simple statement, but oh, I sure did hear what he said, if not in words, but figuring out the thought process behind it - independent judgment.
Just as serious as the Ink decision is concentrating solely on Google, to the exclusion of attention to others, even those up and coming, who deserve an honest look. I'm just realizing that having a dependency on any one entity, whether a person or a company, is not, for myself personally, healthy. Once I'm too dependent, if they arbitrarily make changes, I have to flow with it, whether I like it or not.
For this service, it's not so much whether they all offer the same. It's allowing myself to make an independent choice, instead of falling into what was familiar to me. I stand corrected - I'll personally give all the competition a look with my few centavos.
I'd have to agree wholeheartedly though Marcia. Even if all of the Ink partners offer the exact same deal, each will have quirks in their system of handling it, and varying levels of quality to their customer service... worth trying out just to see which suits your business best.
But in a much larger sense, staying open to alternatives, new players and new ideas is what allows innovation and progress to occur in all areas of enterprise.
That is what it looks like but I would like to be sure.
So if you have a huge site with 3-4,000 pages I don't see the point of inktomi at all. What has happned to search engines these days, with google the only one staying truly free and USEFUL. It use to be all the search engines were free and informative... you could actually find relevant information.
Thanks!
- E. By the way I am going to try the marketing approach of posting on google's discussion groups...
Take a look at the search results at the Ink partner site you'd most like to target, and see what the competition looks like. imho, in most cases it would probably work best with more targeted search terms than the index page generally represents. That would vary, but there have been some threads on Ink optimization, and some seem to feel that it's viable strategy.
In my particular case, fairly small, I've opted for interior pages that were focused and targeted, but less competitive, based on what I had read from others. Under the main keywords the Ink listing would have been buried under pages of LookSmart directory listings at MSN; it'll take a completely different strategy for that word/phrase.
For large sites with lots of pages I believe there's a different program than for the smaller sites.
-s-
When the paid program first started I submitted quite a few URL's, I only submitted the index paid as I was hoping Ink would follow the links
The rankings I got were awful (far worse than my usual attempts) so I switched them over and within 5 days the pages were all ranking
I don't know why this is the case, perhaps it something to the BOW?
thanks :-P
[webmasterworld.com...]
