There has been a lot of speculation made since Yahoo! dropped Google last week as the primary search result provider. What will become of the Direct Feed of Inktomi? The Trusted Feed program?

We have the answers. However, I must ask you to please not share this information with anyone. This information was shared with me and it will not be released to the public until next week. If there is a leak, my source may be less than willing to share information in the future. Thank you for your understanding.

Direct Submit vs. Trusted Feed
In brief summary, direct submit is mainly for sites who only wish to have a small number of URLs in the Inktomi database. There is an annual fee of $25.00 per URL. Trusted Feed is for site who want a large number of URLs included and the payment is done on a CPC (Cost Per Click). The fee is $50,000 annually. Which is quite steep.

This is all changing next week, and here is the inside scoop.

Changes in Direct Submit
If you are currently using Direct Submit, you have until April 15th to be included in the Yahoo! Search results. Next week Yahoo! will announce that the Direct Submit program will have a new format and a new name to boot. The pricing structure will increase, the exact figure was not disclosed, but it will be higher than the $25.00 per page that is currently being charged.

Changes in Trusted Feed

Honestly, this is the biggest news that we have uncovered in years. This is incredible and can drastically change the way you bring traffic to your site!

The changes are as follows:

• The minimum number of URLs to submit is 250
• The minimum deposit is $1,500.00
• You can specify the keywords you want to target for each page and you only pay for those keywords
• You can specify a different Title and Description that you have posted on the page
• The Trusted Feed program will not be renamed and will take top priority after the Sponsored listings from Overture in the Yahoo! Search results
• Trusted Feed will also be displayed in MSN, HotBot and the other partner sites

What This Means: To be involved in the Trusted Feed program is now more affordable, and you have more control. By being able to optimize your pages for Inktomi, your site can come up just below the Sponsored listings that are paying $1.50 – $2.00 per click and you are only paying 30 cents per click! And since you are targeting only the keywords you want, you ensure the traffic is qualified.

No other system gives you more control over your traffic, and since the system will now control 43% of the market, it is a simple and effective way to boost your traffic, your sales, and your market share.

In less than two weeks since their last update, Google updated their data centers early this week. They then did a complete deep crawl on the 12th and then again on the 13th.

In the last update, Google gave more relevancy to internal linked pages. While this is still true, the average site we track lost 28% of their backlinks. What is odd about this is the last update the average site increased their backlinks by 28%! Do not be alarmed at this overall decrease, it is just the filter being modified. Google will continue to modify their filter until they feel it is returning the results they are after.

Research
We are wrapping up our research into some key areas that we will be reporting on shortly. We will give you the update on MSN and how they have dropped LookSmart listings completely. What is going on with Yahoo! and Inktomi. What search engine optimization really means, and what to do if another company hijacks your content. We should have this information to you in a few days.

Google Update
There wasn’t a big change in the algorithm, but there have been slight adjustments over the last few weeks. You should have seen fluctuations in your rankings as well as in your traffic from Google these past two weeks. Remember that PageRank is a numerical value beyond the 0-10 figure. We have extensive articles in our Tips section on how PageRank works.

With Google’s new criteria of treating internal pages with more importance, this makes “Page Saturation” even more valuable. The more pages you have in Google’s index, the higher your link reputation will be.

It has nearly been a week since Yahoo! dumped Google in favor of Inktomi. The following is a current update on the market and also your site’s standing in both Yahoo! and Google in terms of link popularity.

Meta Keyword Tag Back
Even though Inktomi has always indexed the Meta Keyword tag, we have advised our clients not to include it, due to no other engine indexed it. Our advice is now changing. Inktomi indexes both the Meta Keyword and Meta Description tags.

A Yahoo! representative has publicly stated: “Yahoo! Search uses the Meta Keywords tag. We did not use them at FAST or AltaVista. It is important that you make the keywords and description different (targeted) on every page. Exactly what the page is about. Having all the pages have the same keywords and description is not helpful to the search engine.”

Google Increases Index Size
In what can only be described as a publicity stunt aimed at not losing momentum for their IPO, Google announced the same day Yahoo! dumped their results that they had essentially doubled the size of their index to six billion pages. Of the hundreds of domains we track, we have not seen any domain have a significant increase in the number of pages included in the Google index. In fact, the majority of the sites we track had a reduction of the number of pages included in Google before the announced increase.