Inktomi paid inclusion

Inktomi Corp., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Yahoo, is one of the leading providers of paid inclusion services. The Inktomi's paid inclusion program works this way: You pay Inktomi a yearly fee and then your Web site is guaranteed to be in the index of search engines such as MSN Search, HotBot, Excite and LookSmart.

Maybe you've considered using Inktomi's paid inclusion service to enhance the visibility of your Web site or you're already using this service. Is Inktomi's paid inclusion service really worth the money or is it just a rip-off?

What is Inktomi's paid inclusion service?

For a fee of US$39.00/year for the first URL and US$25.00/year for all further URLs, Inktomi will include your Web site address in its index.

The URL you submit to Inktomi will be visited every 48 hours so that there's always your fresh content in the index.

Inktomi currently powers parts of MSN, HotBot, Excite, LookSmart and other major portals such as Walmart.com. Inktomi has recently been acquired by Yahoo so your Web site is likely to appear on Yahoo in the future.

What's the catch?

At first, this sounds very good. You pay just a small yearly fee of US$39.00 and your Web site can be found at many big search engines.

However, you don't pay for a special ranking on Inktomi powered search engines. You just pay for the inclusion in the Inktomi index.

That means that you might pay US$39.00 (for a single URL!) and your Web site is still number 61.983 in the search results on these search engines.

If you want to obtain a high ranking on these search engines, you must make sure that your Web site is optimized for Inktomi's search engine software and for the partner search engines.

Is it worth it?

Inktomi's paid inclusion service - is it for you? If your Web site is properly optimized for the Inktomi index software, Inktomi's paid inclusion service can be a good investment.

Otherwise, it's a waste of money.

To make sure that your Web site is optimized for a high ranking on Inktomi and its partner search engines, you can use the Top 10 Ranking Optimizer tool of our award-winning Web site promotion software IBP.

The Top 10 Ranking Optimizer tool compares your Web site to the top 10 ranked web pages on Inktomi (and other search engines of your choice) for your important keywords. It gives individual advice and tells you in plain English what and how you must change your Web site to get a high ranking on Inktomi powered search engines.