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And, the only thing I get is MSN - despite good rankings in Hotbot :) which seems to be their only other "major" domestic partner left standing.
IMHO, they will be out of business soon. After all, why would anybody continue to pay for such a shoddy product?
I remember when they first started charging, tons of people would post, "we paid for a bunch...keep paying more..." and now people are saying "I'm not going to pay again...why did I waste my money...is there any way to recoup the $30+USD LOSS..."
But, there is a very good chance that if you are patient that your website will be included in INK for free.
but what I'm interested in is trying to make the investment pay. Seems there isn't any way, though - unless I want to try and make more people use MSN search :) which I'm not about to do.
Over the past few days I have begun to see quite a bit of MSN traffic on my site, something that I never saw before. Most of it is to specific pages deep inside the site, so it is not coming from my Zeal listing (a directory, if I understand correctly). So I should assume that I have been listed in Inktomi for free?
I have been steadily building up my links, and now my index page has a Google PR of 6. Is free listing in Inktomi related to number and/or quality of links?
Yes, the more incoming links the greater the chance Inktomi will find you. Quality may very well have something to do with it also. I am sure Ink spiders certain directories and picks op new links that way.
The death sentence is in the words "not cost-effective."
Is Inktomi that bad? If they return an average of just 2.14 people per day to your site (for one listed page at $39), it is $0.05 per click - the same as overture USA.
I get an average of around 5 people per day through Inktomi (most through MSN), that is for four pages ($39+3x$25 = $114). Overture UK charge me a minimum £0.05 per click (about $0.07). Ink send me 1825 visitors/year for $114 which works out at $0.062 per clickthorugh - better than Overture UK.
Chargeback? You cannot chargeback the item
This is what I said:
though you could think about a chargeback, through your credit card
The issue isn't whether or not you can do it, and I said think about it. (and that's not the subject of the thread, anyway)
Though of course, I'm sure you weren't trying to correct what was stated as a suggestion - not a fact.
Your opinion (obviously) is that INK is worth it - FANTASTIC - float them some more money.
As part of our service we include inktomi inclusion. We were able to justify spending that much of our budget because it was worth the extra traffic from those non-Google engines. Altavista be damned.
I think that $39 is "OK" for msn exposure, though $299 for yahoo is outrageous. I like Inktomi. The positiontech service is quite good and the 48 hour spidering was great. Unfortunately, unless inktomi gets a fat deal sewed up soon, it seems as if they are circling the drain.
I for one am very sad at this and am hoping that Inktomi rallies. I really like them.
I couldn't run the risk of paying for those 35 pages, guaranteed or not, when it's possible in time the whole site will get listed and that 10 visitors will turn into 50 .... for nothing.
Remember if you pay for Ink. you will never get more than you pay for. It's a bit of gamble Is supose to try and get in for free but the prize is greater than if pay for limited number of urls.
z6
To get anywhere with this bottom tier traffic you have to optimize for low-competition multiple keyword phrases, which takes a lot of work and still may not earn it's keep with the low traffic levels Inktomi PFI has fallen to. Of coarse if you operate a simplistic site business model where you don't account for overhead and don't really care about ROI and are willing to spend a big chunk of your site revenues for advertising, or just want some branding, then Ink PFI may be just fine until one or both of you go belly up.
If you've expended the effort to optimize for low-competition multiple keyword phrases you can get a lot of free traffic from sources such as Google and Google.Yahoo, AOL and even Alta Vista, Lycos and Ask Jeeves if you know what you're doing and maybe, just maybe, you might get into Inktomi for free now that they appear to be trying to freshen up their index.
I've calculated my value for those bottom tier MSN visitors to be in the range of 1-2 cents so it takes a lot of them to justify the $25 annual fee, since I operate a site business model that limits advertising fees to 10% of revenues. At 2 cents value per visitor I need about 35 visitors per day to make the ROI on a page work out and right now very few pages that's I've previously registered in better days are getting that many visitors.
I have seen a very slight uptick in Ink PFI traffic the past few days and hope it's a sign of better days ahead, but there's a long, long way to go to get back to the go-go days before their loss of AOL and their gigapage indexing of early August. I really hope they make it somehow.
There is no excuse for the lead up to the pay for inclusion program. My opinion is that they thought by not indexing anything new for a while, people would be starving to get into their db.
The thing they didn't consider was competition when people started going elsewhere in masses, and that the SEO community if viewed as potential clients, needs to be treated with respect.
Keep in mind, this is all just mho. What ever that's worth :)
