Theme based sites and Inktomi

[harv]

Assuming that search engines are beginning
to look more favourably on theme based sites
what is the situation when you submit just your
home page to the paid Inktomi service, not
the other pages ?

[ihelpyou]

I have never "paid" for a page, but from what I know, your page is spidered and then indexed. No guarantee of a rank. No other pages are spidered of the site except the one paid for. The rest of the site is treated as normal. You have to either submit the pages, or they are found by the spider through other outside links.

Inktomi seems to not give much regard to the "theme" way of things.

[markymark]

That's my understanding too. Ink. doesn't care about themes or any of that. Keyword density, title, description and keyword tags - that's what you need for success with Ink.

[JuniorHarris]

ditto what markymark said!~;)

[harv]

>> Ink. doesn't care about themes or any of that.
>> Keyword density, title, description and keyword
>>tags - that's what you need for success with Ink.

and I assume that link popularity is also not taken into account ?

[MakeMeTop]

Just to be different, and with hundreds of pages in paid inclusion, here's my observations.

For reasonably non-competitive areas the above statements are pretty much correct - initially. Paid pages are viewed in isolation and theme does not come into it. However, Ink does look to see if they are 'orphan' pages within the first month and may reduce ranking if the page paid for has no link from its immediately proceeding index page. If through their regular crawling they find other links to the page from their Best of Web index - you will get a slight boost.

In competitive areas, you can pay 'til you are blue in the face and still get nowhere. Links from LookSmart US are an absolute must to have any chance of climbing the ladder, Yahoo and ODP also help plus any other links from their BOW DB. In this context the theme of the link is crucial.

I would agree though that site theme seems to have little effect on an individual page ranking - but a big effect on the ranking of the home page after time.