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How to Optimize Your Website for Both Google & Inktomi
by Jim Hedger ©Copyright 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 relatively 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 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. 

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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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