Summary: Although I put it under the search engine section Inktomi is not a search engine. Inktomi is a database that supplies search results for many search engines. The most notable of these search engines are HotBot and Canada. Inktomi is a very powerful database since it serves search results for a lot of various search engines. But many believe inktomi is losing its steam. Due to its high price to search engines many search engines are no longer partnering with inktomi.

How to get listed: To get listed in the Inktomi database you can either use the free submit web site forms in one of its partner sites or you can use the paid service one of which can be found at Position Tech.

How to get a good listing: It is hard to say how to get a good listing in Inktomi since different search engines use the database and many of the search engines interperate the database in various ways so search results will come up differently. There are a few general things to consider when trying to get a site listed in Inktomi though.

First off, to get a good listing you should use their paid listing service found at Position Tech. Luckily Position Tech isn't too expensive although the price has recently be rising. The price is currently $30 for the first page you want listed and then $12 for every page thereafter. This will get you into the Inktomi database within a couple of days instead of waiting for weeks using the free submit web site forms. Another great thing about paying for inclusion is that the Inktomi spider will crawl your page every 48 hours making it easy for you to see if any updates made to your page affected your ranking in search engines.

Having sites that are already listed in Inktomi is very important now too. If you submit your site with the free submit web site form your site will immediately receive a ranking penalty when it is indexed. This penalty is removed once the main Inktomi spider reaches your site by crawling links on other website not related to your own. This new procedure by Inktomi is to try and prevent people from spamming their database. They figure if a site has links coming into it from other sites it has a higher probability of being a high quality legitamate site. If you or anyone else does not submit to your site with the free submit web site form but instead only do the paid inclusion through Position Tech then you will not receive the penalty.

Frequency of updates: If you use the free submit web site form expect your site to be indexed within 6-8 weeks, if at all. If you use Position Tech's paid inclusion service your site will get updated approximately every 48 hours.

Name of bot: Slurp. Check your website logs and see if Slurp has visited your site.

Read more at: Zettas.com