Yahoo Switching to Inktomi?
Yahoo Switching To Inktomi?
I took a leap a few months ago, predicting when Yahoo! would change search results providers. I thought my theory was sound, but apparently Yahoo! seems to have a few different ideas.
I figured, based on their history of rolling out new features a few days after announcing their quarterly earnings, that they would roll out with Inktomi results in early October (Tuesday, October 14th to be exact). There was a reason for the date, but you will have to read the other article to find out what that is.
While I was a little off on the date (OK way off, as it still hasn’t happened yet), it is still obvious that this is going to happen some time soon. Which brings me to the point of all this speculation, and a question for you – are you ready for the switch?
Think about this for a second before you answer. Consider the implications of having (or not having) listings in Inktomi right now. If you do not have an Inktomi listing, not only are you alienating 1/3 of your possible web traffic (vis-a-vis Microsoft’s MSN), but you have the potential of losing another 1/3 of your traffic once Yahoo! does do the change. That means you could be losing 66% of your total traffic. Wouldn’t this justify the paid inclusion fees?
If you do have Inktomi listings, consider what they are. Do they accurately describe your site? Do a search on MSN for your keywords. Do they come up? How compelling is the description. Would you click on your listing if you were looking for your product, or are your competitor’s listings more compelling? Keep in mind that MSN has their own ranking algorithm, so at the moment there is no way to influence rankings up or down. But just take a minute to look at the results and put yourself in your customer’s shoes and think about which result you would click on.
One more thing to think about: We have seen an incredible increase in traffic from the Inktomi crawler, also known as Slurp. And it has been incredibly active during the last 3 or 4 months. This can only mean one thing. That Yahoo! is gearing up for the switch by building the database. Which leads to the question; Are you being found by Slurp?
You can easily find out by viewing your log file reports. Most log analysis software can distinguish between browsers and spiders. You will want to look under the “spiders” section of the report to see if Slurp has been there, and how often. Based on our data, Slurp should be one of your top 3 spiders over the past few months.
If it hasn’t been there, you may want to consider paying for inclusion on a few pages just to get the spider visiting. Otherwise you do risk losing a lot of potential traffic when the change occurs.
On a final note, it has been almost a year since Yahoo! bought Inktomi. December 23rd was the day we brought the news to you. Wouldn’t it be poetic if Yahoo! made the change on that date – one year later? After all, it is a Tuesday.
Author Name: Rob Sullivan
Company: Searchengineposition.com
Author:
Rob Sullivan
Production Manager
Searchengineposition.com
Search Engine Positioning Specialists
