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http://www.co-internet.net/net/articles/paidinclusions-det1.txt.html

Paid Search Engine Inclusion Programs - The Details (1)
Inktomi + AltaVista
------------------------------------------------------
by
Dirk Brockhausen
------------------------------------------------------
Following our overview of current paid search
engine inclusion (PFI) programs, we will now take a
closer look at the technical procedures involved,
spidering activity, quality of service, etc. This first
instalment deals with Inktomi and AltaVista, more will
follow in a later article.

Inktomi
-------
Inktomi's current submission partners are:
ineedhits.com, Outrider, Position Technologies and
VeriSign.

Outrider is PositionTech's London based partner.
Personnel connections exist between PositionTech and
Outrider via Detlef Johnson, the former Supervisor
Search Engine Optimization Services with Outrider, now
functioning as VP of Technology with PositionTech.

We registered new domains with all four partners and
tracked the ensuing spider visits.

ineedhits.com
=============
The Inktomi spider arrived the day following
page submission:

#UA Mozilla/3.0 (Slurp/si; slurp@inktomi.com;
http://www.inktomi.com/slurp.html)
j6002.inktomi.com
209.185.141.249

Regularly, this spider will crawl your pages every
second day. However, we detected exceptions from the
rule. E.g. following the turn of the month, the spider
took 4 days to come back.

Beyond the pages registered for paid inclusion, the
domain URL (e.g. http://www.domain.com/ ) was spidered.

This will normally occur every 5 days, with the site's
robots.txt file being crawled as well.

However, the domain URL hasn't to date been included in
the Inktomi index.

About two weeks following paid submission, this Inktomi
spider started to fetch the pages in irregular intervals:

#UA Mozilla/5.0 (Slurp/cat; slurp@inktomi.com;
http://www.inktomi.com/slurp.html)
wm3018.inktomi.com
216.35.116.103

Beyond Spidering
----------------
Spider visits apart, what's important for the
submitting webmaster is, of course, the PFI partners'
Management Area or control center.

In ineedhits.com's "Subscription Management Area" you
will see your URLs's current status.

The "Click-thru hits report" displays the number of
hits and the search terms which generated them. You can
click on the links to either AOL, HotBot or MSN to see
the pertinent search results page. According to
ineedhits.com: "Click-Thru reports currently only
reflect a small percentage of the entire click-thrus
Inktomi Search Partners refer to your URL."

This is no exaggeration: in our case, only about 75% of
hits and keywords actually generated were displayed in
this report. Obviously, this calls for some serious
improvement.

Outrider
========
About 1 to 2 hours after submission, our site was
visited by the PositionTech spider:

#UA Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.01; Windows NT)
169.207.238.180

It was a one-hit affair only: we haven't seen this
spider visit our site again since.

Another two hours later, the Inktomi crawling cycle
commended with a visit from this spider:

#UA Mozilla/3.0 (Slurp/si; slurp@inktomi.com;
http://www.inktomi.com/slurp.html)
j6002.inktomi.com
209.185.141.249

Following this, the spider started visiting the site in
the same rhythm as with ineedhits.com.

Beyond Spidering
----------------
In Outrider's "Account Service" section you will see
your URLs's current status and the number of generated
clicks. According to Outrider: "Click-Thru reports
reflect less then half of all traffic generated by
Inktomi."
This can be confirmed on our part: on average, less
than 50% of generated clicks were reported.

PositionTech
============
The PositionTech spider arrived one hour after
submission:

#UA Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.01; Windows NT)
169.207.238.180

Another hour later, the Inktomi spider cropped up:

#UA Mozilla/3.0 (Slurp/si; slurp@inktomi.com;
http://www.inktomi.com/slurp.html)
j6002.inktomi.com
209.185.141.249

Ensuing spider behavior was identical to submissions
via ineedhits.com and Outrider.

Beyond Spidering
----------------
In PositionTech's subscribers area you will see your
URLs's current status and the number of generated
clicks as well as the keywords entered by visitors. In
our case, only 40% of actually generated hits and
keywords were displayed.
Here, there is no pointer to the fact that not all
clicks will be correctly displayed. This calls for
improvement.
Click-thru data can also be checkd in a graphical view.

A very nifty feature exclusively offered by
PositionTech is their "Pure Web Search" function. Under
URL < http://169.207.238.189/search/ > a search form
for pure Inktomi is offered. Search results are
uncluttered by "enhancements" such as Overture PPC
links, ODP stuff, ads, etc. This URL is accessible to
the general public (at least, currently).

VeriSign
========
One day after submission, the Inktomi spider arrived:

#UA Mozilla/3.0 (Slurp/si; slurp@inktomi.com;
http://www.inktomi.com/slurp.html)
j6002.inktomi.com
209.185.141.249

Ensuing spider behavior was identical to submissions
via the other partners.

Beyond Spidering
----------------
In VeriSign's subscribers area you will see your
URLs's current status and the number of generated
clicks as well as the keywords entered by visitors.
However, this did not work in our case. Although our
access log files registered several hits, VeriSign
did not display so much as a single one of them.

Inktomi PFI Summary
===================
* Pricing is identical, regardless of submission
partner.
* Submitting your pages to any of the partners will
trigger the Inktomi spider, which will then crawl your
pages following its own rhythm, independent of chosen
submission partner. Partners do seem to hold a certain
influence on commencement of the spidering cycle,
though.
* With PositionTech and Outrider it took a mere 1-2
hours for the first Inktomi spider to arrive. They are
also the only submission partners checking sites with
their own (shared) spider.
* Inktomi seems to have devoted a single spider for
crawling pages under the PFI program.
* Crawled pages will normally show up in the Inktomi
index about one day after spidering.
* PositionTech's subscribers area control center offers
the most comprehensive functionality, making it the
superior service.

However, seeing that no submission partner will
currently process 100% of generated hits, a systematic
analysis of your own server traffic logs cannot be
discarded.

AltaVista's infoSpider
======================
Paid inclusion for AltaVista is handled by their
independent partner infoSpider.

Shortly after submission, a spider will check the
submitted URL:

#UA infoSpider URL Checker
208.185.243.149.proboost.com
208.185.243.149

Four days after, the first AltaVista spider arrived on
site:

#UA Scooter-3.0.3
scooter2.sv.av.com
209.73.162.172

Pages were included in AltaVista's index the following
day.

The spidering cycle is determined by AltaVista's index
runs for paid inclusions, which is about once per week.

The AltaVista spider(s) will visit submitted pages one,
two or three days prior to this index run. There is
currently no regular, predictable rhythm discernible as
with Inktomi.

AltaVista has devoted at least one other spider to
crawling PFI pages:

#UA Scooter-3.2
scooter3.sv.av.com
209.73.162.143

Beyond Spidering
----------------
In infoSpider's Service section, you can check on your
URLs' current status. No hits and keywords data is
being offered.

Compared to Inktomi's PFI program, AltaVista's refresh
cycles are considerably longer, and the service area
offered features only very basic functionality.

This text may freely be republished or distributed in unmodified form provided the following resource box is included intact either at the beginning or the end of the article and a complimentary copy or notice (link) is sent to the author at the address specified below:

Ralph Tegtmeier is the co-founder and principal of fantomaster.com GmbH (Belgium), < http://fantomaster.com/ >, a company specializing in webmasters software development, industrial-strength cloaking and search engine positioning services.

He has been a web marketer since 1994 and is editor-in-chief of fantomNews, a free newsletter focusing on search engine optimization, available at: < http://fantomaster.com/fantomnews-sub.html > You can contact him at mailto:fneditor@fantomaster.com
(c) copyright 2002 by fantomaster.com
All rights reserved.
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