Inktomi expands deal with Amazon

[CuriousWeb]

[internetnews.com ]

[seth_wilde]

This is good for Ink's financial statement but it's really just watering down their results more..

I'm still waiting for Ink to announce a new partnership with someone who's willing to show their results..

[Iguana]

This follows on from one of the discussions in the Google forum about Google putting product links into their searches. Many of us affiliates rely on searchers entering, say, a band name followed by an album name and the searcher arriving at our site and clicking on our affiliate link to Amazon or CDNow. It sounds like Inktomi will put the Amazon link to the product in the search results - and us affiliates will suffer because of it.

[jeremy goodrich]

That's a good point, Iguana. Why would such a large company waste money on CPC, when CPA could pay off much better? (they don't have their own money at stake through a CPA program...)

And as Seth mentioned, they'd best find someplace else to display those listings - and fast too, else they're likely to see a huge decline in revenue as more and more people don't renew those one year spidering deals.

[mayor]

How does one pronouce "Amazomi"

[Grumpus]

There's one key thing to keep in mind here. Your rankings in INK can be optimized just as with any other spider. Be relevant and it'll show higher. Have link popularity and it'll show higher. Etc. Etc.

Because it's unlawful for INK to affect WHERE Amazon shows up in the SERPS, it'll still be possible to come in ahead of them, just as we do now (sometimes) in Google. (And if that's not the case, watch for the E-Bay's and CDNow's to start a little clamor).

What I think is most interesting about the article is the fact that Amazon's feeding INK the data rather than a spider hitting each page. So much for needing good navigation. I'd love to be able to dump a URL, description of my design, and a batch of keywords to the search enginges.

In the end, though, Amazon is still paying for inclusion, not paying for top, or any other ranked placement. They're just paying to get in there.

I'm regularly ranking higher than Amazon for dozens of products for which they have placement in Google now (not counting the hundreds where Amazon didn't get that product into the index). Sure, there are literally thousands upon thousands more where Amazon is ahead of me, but on many of those, I'm creeping up each month, as well. The giants are big, and it takes time to work out, but a solo computer geek such as myself can always get better placement with work and time. I have even managed to sneak ahead of Amazon on many MSN listings. (Money helps, but it's not always necessary - I've paid less than $50 on promotions this year).

It's an interesting article and lets me know I've got a little work to do this Christmas to keep my MSN results fresh and broad. Thanks for the tip, CuriousWeb!

G.

[mayor]

Grumpus, it was my understanding that Index Connect allows one to feed the page description into Ink rather than let the algo try to figure it out.

Please correct me if I'm wrong. I may be confusing it with some other program.

If I understand this thing correctly, it's kind of like back to metatags where you can make sure the page shows up under the keywords you want. Now that may not put you at the top of the SERP's but it would sure help you beat out a lot of harder-to-interpret pages.

[Grumpus]

You can give the page the keywords you want, sure. But, any page with more relevant keywords and better link-pop (which last I checked was part of INK's algo, still) is going to show first. If it's anything else and they're not getting a special spot on the page (like adwords or something like that) then they are paying for "LOCATION" within the serps and that's been determined to be illegal.

G

[jeremy goodrich]

Hu? Paying for location on a page is 'illegal' how does that work? (that sounds like news to me...)

[Grumpus]

The Pay-for-Location results (AdWords, Overture, etc.) must be labeled as "Sponsored Results" or "Advertisements". The article we're talking about here is to get into Inktomi's main index, in which case they can't do anything to affect placement within the results without labeling it as such. This is nothing new. Maybe I'm not explaining it very well...

G.

[skibum]

The way I understand IC is that it doesn't guarantee specific placement, but since Ink knows their own algo, the data that gets fed into the XML feed is going to be better optimized to generate top rankings than most other pages.

It is not a guaranteed placement, rankings, or clicks, but it is really hard to believe that there is no advantage to IC than simply including more pages and refreshing them more often - especially since they get paid per click.