Inktomi Insight. I called Ross Dunn today, looking for some insight into Inktomi, Yahoo’s search engine in waiting. Inktomi will soon replace Google as Yahoo’s search engine. Ross is a Murdok SEO veteran and a super nice guy.
He likes Inktomi’s predictable and stable algorithm. It allows him to provide predictable and stable Inktomi placement to his clients. It’s the StepForth office’s favorite database to optimize for. If you have a good placement with Inktomi it may alter slightly, he says, but it won’t drop.
What’s your experience with Inktomi?
From the searcher’s perspective however this stinks because it indicates a lack of algorithm upkeep that may deliver more spam than useful results, and deliver Google more searchers.
As Yahoo makes Inktomi more Google-competitive their algorithm is going to have a more Google-like unpredictability as they start dodging optimization techniques and striving for ultimate relevance.
So watch for some big changes in the Inktomi algorithm when Yahoo officially moves to only Inktomi results. (Probably at the time of Google’s IPO.)
Ranking well with Inktomi (for now…) is simple, said Ross. Make sure you have good meta tags, keyword titles, and good body text with your keyword relevantly peppered in there about 3 or so times. Standard optimization stuff, what used to rank you well with Google. Don’t spam them though. Check out Ross’s buddy’s article if you have any spam concerns.
Jill Whalen said, in an interview with WebProWorld’s Brittany Thompson, “My strategies are the same for all engines. I don’t do anything specific for any engine. The main way I optimize is through good keyword research, so I optimize for words people actually search for and incorporate them into the physical content of the page.”
No two algorithms are the same but Jill doesn’t stress over the differences and similarities between Inktomi’s algorithm and Google’s algorithm. She says all search engines “want to see relevant content” and “little differences don’t matter all that much.”
Flaketomi? Inktomi, says Daniel Brandt of GoogleWatch.org, has long had a reputation for flakiness – their crawler’s often on autopilot, crawling sites without listing them in the index. There’s even some guff in WebMasterWorld about people who have paid for listings but still don’t show up in the results.
Inktomi Dropping Pages. In addition, he’s had 40 – 50,000 listings recently dropped from Inktomi. His main site, namebase.org, is a resource on political figures. While about 300 or so listings remain, this drop could point to a reduction in resources allocated to the index or a change in their pay-for-inclusion model.
Pay For Placement. I asked Ross about Daniel Brandt’s observations that Inktomi drops unpaid pages. It’s true. Ross says Inktomi is definitely an engine you should pay to be in. “I’ll pay twenty bucks for stability any day.”
Is that Canadian or US?
But seriously, it’s probably a good idea to fork over a little dough right now for Inktomi placement. Get in early with Google’s main competitor.
When will Yahoo move to Inktomi results? Last year, after Overture was purchased by Yahoo, Jill says a Yahoo spokesperson told her that until they are sure they’ll have the same quality of relevance that they currently have with Google, they won’t make any changes. “Everyone speculates that will be soon,” Jill says, “but I haven’t seen any results yet.”
Korrection. Kanoodle’s new contextual ad product is called ContextTarget, not Kanoodle Kontext, as I called it yesterday.
Garrett + The Murdok Team
Garrett French is the editor of Murdok’s eBusiness channel. You can talk to him directly at WebProWorld, the eBusiness Community Forum.
