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About more than one year ago, I had the brilliant idea to enhance my web site listing with paid inclusion in Inktomi through positiontech.
The reason was, that I had position 7 for my major keyword in MSN but my web site didn't appear in other inktomi feeds.
I paid, my site got crawled and in less than 48 hours I was in the positiontech search on place around 50. And MSN? They have replaced my position 7 and added me at around 50 :)
Here I have lost about 1000 unique visitors daily. Fortunately, there were still my product specific pages in MSN and helped that the downfall of my traffic was not disastrous.
Angry about the removel of my top 7 position, I didn't paid for positiontech the second year. And what happened? All, free and paid, pages of my web site disappeared from positiontech search and later from MSN.
Now, I have 0 traffic from Inktomi/MSN.
Yes, I am actually waiting for the free pick-up. :) I hope it will be faster than the usual up to three months.
Avoid the PFI and Ink will consider you a "more credible" site. It may take longer but definitely more worthwhile.
The reason was, that I had position 7 for my major keyword in MSN but my web site didn't appear in other inktomi feeds.
If by that you mean content providers, I don't see why that would be.
Yes, I am actually waiting for the free pick-up. :) I hope it will be faster than the usual up to three months.
You probably wont be re-indexed for free.
Avoid the PFI and Ink will consider you a "more credible" site. It may take longer but definitely more worthwhile.
Explain how going PFI would make you "less credible". PFI gurantees that your site will be crawled/indexed on a regular basis; it doesn't flux the credibility of your site one bit.
Couldn't agree more. Paid Inclusion with Inktomi has gone straight downhill.
If you think Ink PFI sucked badly, wait till you get a load of SiteMatch :-)
It's the exact same thing with a new name. Not one thing has changed other than the name.
I mean after April 15th your ink submissions will vanish in yahoo and I am assuming that msn will drop ink in July?
I have no idea where that came from, but I have no clue why you think your Y!/Ink submission will drop on exactly April 15th. As far as I know, your listing will stay.
As far as MSN, they will probably be dropping Ink listings in July; so yes, your Ink/Y! listing in MSN will be gone from MSN.
panic, Site Match has a ppc component so it is very different than Ink pfi. And Yahoo has said Ink pfi pages will drop out April 15th.
You might want to read the Yahoo forum.
Since approximately Feb 23rd (I can't rememebr the exact date), current Inktomi customers have been having the added bonus of Yahoo! traffic.
On April 15th, customers who paid to be included in the Inktomi results, will cease to have the benefit of the additional Yahoo! traffic.
They have two options:
1) Do nothing and continue to receive the current Inktomi Distribution
2) Migrate / upgrade to Site Match and receive
* Yahoo! Traffic
* Inktomi Distribution
* allTheWeb/Fast Distribution
* AltaVista Distribution
It bears almost no resemblence to Inktomi PFI, and will cost you an absolute fortune in comparison to the old flat fee, if you wanted to achieve the same results.
Sadly, most of us are now being priced out of the market because if you're not doing SiteMatch, you stand no real chance of competing in Yahoo search results (not for competitive or commercial phrases anyway).
Free Inktomi listings don't stand a chance in the Yahoo SERPS, against the SiteMatch "fresh" pages.
Wanna bet?
:)
I look forward to reading more about the future of Inktomi optimisation from the maestro.
When's the next update on your site, or have you got an e-book in the pipeline? :-)
After I stopped using them all my pages in MSN and Ink dropped to worthless positions. Now the same thing has happened at Yahoo.
Was spending $1,000s a month at overture and $600 a month on sponsored Yahoo directory listings. Have cancelled both. Yahoo will not get another dime from my company until the sites I run show up in their results. ... which Im not counting on.
Anyone who pays for Site Match rather than the regular Overture program isnt thinking as Site Match is ridiculously overpriced program compared to other paid options.
Mark my words... over the next months the number of webmasters who complain about their site being dropped way down in Yahoo search results will sky rocket.
This will result in more webmasters trying site match. Its the only way Yahoo is going to be able to show that their Site Match program is working.
I see evidence of optimisation! The "bias" is simply the fact that a good SEO can use PFI to their advantage. However a very good SEO can still beat PFI pages by understanding the way the algo works for both PFI and non-PFI.
Yahoo IMO are absolutely telling the truth when they say they are using the same algo for both forms of listings. However, I also believe that PFI does things like give a base link-pop assumption and a higher starting base for "quality" factors for a PFI page. These can be overcome with free listings by having a higher number of quality incoming links and gaining other things that boost the "quality" factors needed by Yahoo in their ranking algo.
So like all things, it depends what you mean by bias! IMO any web site that uses SEO/SEM tactics has things biased in their favour - but a page that does not use appropriate SEO/SEM tailoring can use PFI until they are blue in the face. They'll still appear nowhere! So how does that make Yahoo biased in their favour?
Utilisation of PFI makes things easier for the marketer, but it is up to them to make use of the tools available.
I've got sites ranking for killer phrases in highly competitive areas where a large number of people are using PFI and I've let it lapse. I still beat them and will continue to do so (I hope) until such time as they can overcome the inbuilt "bias" that Yahoo has for my sites due to their age and larger "quality" link popularity. Being listed in all the major directories helps rather well, also!
As far as the site you mentioned is concerned, it seems obvious to me that PFI pages will rank better than pages not using PFI if taken as an average. The vast majority of pages not using PFI have no optimisation done to them and the vast majority of PFI pages have! So what does that prove? Optimised pages do better on Yahoo than non-optimised ones.
I think that's something we can all agree with :)
But it comes down to which other factors affect the ranking and where they sit in priority with the current algo. I suppose we can only guess at that, and then again, the algo is likely to change.
No, I'm not going to do it: in my industry there's still room for everybody and my competitors web presence and SE-presence is rather weak.
But who prevents anybody from doing this to ME?
What I DID find, however, was that "paying-for-inktomi-then-dropping-from-the-index" dates back to (at least) 2001 already...
I alsy found that signup in for free inclusion to Inktomi by (hotbot I think) could get one penalized in 2002.
The most important point that MakeMeTop made here is that PFI gives a clear boost due to the fact that it must ESTIMATE the link pop of the page rather than using the normal link structure data of the web. This is how they can still say "we just apply the regular algorithm on PFI pages" and yet still give a boost in reality so they make more money.
This is especially true for the XML Feed programs which their partners are feeding Yahoo. Since they're not real pages, but are rather just fake auto-generated pages which can be manipulated, there is no regular link data to associate with it from the regular web. Therefore, they just estimate the link pop factor for the auto-generated page... which ends up giving it a boost.
Im very happy to hear that Ask Jeeves... and now MSN have both recently announced that the trusted feed PFI programs hurt relevancy and cause mistrust of the search results and have decided not to use them in their indexes (MSN said they wont use PFI in their new search engine). I'm confident that Yahoo will soon follow suit and will dumpt their new PFI program. They have to be smart enough to know that if they want to compete, they MUST have relevant search results that people can trust and PFI simply does not jive with that end goal.
We all soon will witness the death of this failed experiment called PFI.
They are surprised by the huge problem that has been created and am sure they are working to figure out the best way to address the "real" problem of legitimate, high quality sites being penalized.
At the same time, they need to be certain that the changes they make dont open the flood gates to the real spam sites they are trying to keep out of the index.
Based on the conversation with Yahoo Im convinced that the problems faced by legitimate, quality sites being penalized will be addressed. They are fully aware that people's livelihoods are seriously affected by them not showing up in search results.
While Yahoo's goal is to maximize profits, I sensed that they are sincere in their efforts to ensure that high quality, valuable sites show up well in their organic results.
If you speak to someone at yahoo again I'd love to address the issue of how when some people paid for PFI at time that sitematch was born all the free pages that were in yahoo were removed. This happened to me and a few people I know.
PFI did add a de-activate url section finally to the
control panel but this seems to not have changed anything since the same urls are still in msn and yahoo and the free ones listed never came back.
My only hope is that when the free trial ends on April 15th the pages really will get dropped that are paid so that the free pages will return. It really seems that if you paid during the transition period there is no yahoo free crawl on those pages.
