How to Optimize Your Website for Both Google & Inktomi

How to Optimize Your Website for Both Google & Inktomi
by Jim Hedger, SEO Manager, January 21, 2004.


The search engine environment continues to evolve rapidly, easily
outpacing the ability of consumers and SEO practitioners to quickly
adapt to the new landscape. With the ascension of Inktomi to the
level of importance that until recently was held solely by Google,
SEO practitioners need to rethink several strategies, tactics and,
perhaps even the ethics of technique. Assuming this debate will
unfold over the coming months, how does an "ethical SEO firm" work
to optimize websites for two remarkably unique search engines
without falling back on old-fashioned spammy tactics of leader-pages
or portal-sites? Recently, another SEO unrelated to StepForth told
me that he was starting to re-optimize his websites to meet what he
thought were Inktomi's standards as a way of beating his competition
to what looks to be the new main driver. That shouldn't be necessary
if you are careful and follow all the "best practices" developed
over the years.

The answer to our puzzle is less than obvious but it lies in the
typical behaviors of the two search tools. While there are a number
of similarities between the two engines, most notably in behaviors
of their spiders, there are also significant differences in the way
each engine treats websites. For the most part, Google and Inktomi
place the greatest weight on radically different site elements when
determining eventual site placement. For Google, strong and relevant
link-popularity is still one of the most important factors in
achieving strong placements. For Inktomi, titles, meta tags and text
are the most important factors in getting good rankings. Both
engines consider the number and arrangement of keywords, incoming
links, and the anchor text used in links (though Google puts far
more weight on anchor text than Inktomi tends to). That seems to be
where the similarities end and, the point where SEO tactics need
revision. Once Inktomi is adopted as Yahoo's main listing provider,
both Google and Inktomi will drive relativity similar levels of
search engine traffic. Each will be as important as the other with
the caveat that Inktomi powers two of the big three while Google
will only power itself.

2004 - The Year of the Spider-Monkey
The first important factor to think about is how does each spider
work?

Entry to Inktomi Does Not Mean Full-Indexing
Getting your site spidered by Inktomi's bot "Slurp" is essential.
Like "Google-bot", "Slurp" will follow every link it comes across,
reading and recording all information. A major difference between
Google and Inktomi is that, when Google spiders a new site, there is
a good chance of getting placements for an internal page without
paying for that specific page to appear in the index. As far as we
can tell, that inexpensive rule of thumb does not apply to Inktomi.
While it is entirely possible to get entire sites indexed by
Inktomi, we have yet to determine if Inktomi will allow all pages
within a site to achieve placements without paying for these sites
to appear in the search engine returns pages, (SERPs). Remember,
Inktomi is a paid-inclusion service which charges webmasters an
admission fee based on the number of pages in a site they wish to
have spidered. From the information we have gathered, Slurp will
follow each link in a site and, if provided a clear path, will
spider every page in the site but, pages within that site that are
paid-for during the submission will be spidered far more frequently
and will appear in the indexes months before non-paid pages. We
noted this when examining how many pages Inktomi lists from newer
clients versus how many from old clients. We have noticed the older
the site, the more pages appear in Inktomi's database and on SERPs
on search engines using the Inktomi database. (This is assuming the
webmaster only paid for inclusion of their INDEX page) Based on
Inktomi's pricing, an average sized site of 50 pages could cost up
to $1289 per year to have each page added to the paid-inclusion
database so it is safer then not to assume that most small-business
webmasters won't want to pay that much.

Google's Gonna Get You
Google-bot is like the Borg in Star Trek. If you exist on the web
and have a link coming to your site from another site in Google's
index, Google-bot will find you and assimilate all your information.
As the best known and most prolific spider on the web, Google-bot
and its cousin Fresh-bot visit sites extremely frequently. This
means that most websites with effective links will get into Google's
database without needing to manually submit the site. As Google
currently does not have a paid-inclusion model, every page in a site
can be expected to appear somewhere on Google produced SERPs. By
providing a way of finding each page in the site (effective internal
links), website designers should see their sites appearing in
Google's database within two months of publishing.

We Now Serve Two Masters; Google and Inktomi
OK, that said, how to optimize for both without risking placements
at one over the other. The basic answer is to give each of them what
they want. For almost a year, much of the SEO industry focused on
linking strategies in order to please Google's PageRank. Such heavy
reliance on linking is likely one of the reasons Google re-ordered
its algorithm in November. Relevant incoming links are still be
extremely important but can no longer be considered the "clincher"
strategy for our clients. Getting back to the basics of site
optimization and remembering the lessons learned over the past 12-
months should produce Top10 placements. SEOs and webmasters should
spend a lot of time thinking about titles, tags and text as well as
thinking about linking strategies (both internal and external).
Keyword arrangement and densities are back on the table and need to
be examined by SEOs and their clients as the new backbone of
effective site optimization. While the addition of a text-based
sitemap has always been considered an SEO Best Practice, it should
now be considered an essential practice. The same goes for unique
titles and tags on each page of a site. Another essential practice
SEOs will have to start harping on is to only work with sites that
have unique, original content. I am willing to bet that within 12-
months, Inktomi introduces a rule against duplicate content as a
means of controlling both the SEO industry and the affiliate
marketing industry. Sites with duplicate content are either mirrors,
portals or affiliates, none of which should be necessary for the
hard-working SEO. While there are exceptional circumstances where
duplicate content is needed, more often than not dupe-content is a
waste of bandwidth and will impede a SEO campaign more than it would
help.

The last tip for this article is, don't be afraid to pass higher
costs on to the clients because if your client wants those
placements soon, paid-inclusion of internal pages will be expected.
When one really examines the costs of paid inclusion it is not
terribly different than other advertising costs, with one major
exception. Most paid-advertising is regionally based (or is
prohibitively expensive for smaller businesses). Search engine
advertising is, by nature, international exposure and that is worth
paying for.


Jim Hedger is the SEO Manager of StepForth Search Engine Placement
Inc. Based in Victoria, BC, Canada, StepForth is the result of the
consolidation of BraveArt Website Management, Promotion Experts, and
Phoenix Creative Works, and has provided professional search engine
placement and management services since 1997.
http://www.stepforth.com/ Tel - 250-385-1190 Toll Free - 877-385-
5526 Fax - 250-385-1198



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