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Case Study: Is Lycos InSite Pro Paid Inclusion Worth It?

Last Update: Sunday, March 06, 2005.

In this article I will show you the results of my test with the Lycos InSite Pro paid inclusion site submission program.

I recently tested the Lycos InSite Pro paid inclusion system. InSite Pro offers guaranteed inclusion in the Lycos web index within 48 hours of submission, and full refresh of my web pages every 48 hours.

Lycos InSite Pro offers two packages:

* 1-250 Pages: $189.00/month

* 251-500 Pages: $279.00/month

I opted for the $279/month plan. I have about 500 pages of content across my network of sites and wanted all of them indexed in Lycos.

The Results

Lycos currently do not provide keyword, impression or click-through stats, although they do intend to offer them in the near future.

So I checked my traffic stats according to my WebTrendsLive reports. I was shocked to find that Lycos only sent 41 visitors in the first 2 weeks of indexing my site. During the same period, Google sent me thousands of visitors.

So I wrote to Lycos and asked if they could provide access to click through stats for my account. I wanted to double check, just in case my stats were wrong. They couldn't.

So I also asked what I could change in my pages to get more traffic.

Here's their helpful reply:

Every entry in the Lycos index is created by automated software called a "spider." When a Web page is submitted to Lycos, the spider examines the full text of the page and determines relevant keywords based on its composition.

The spider will pay close attention to the components of the URL, the TITLE tag, headings and subheadings, frequency of word use, location of words on the Web page, and the distance between words.

If your Web page contains frames, our spider will be able to index the text in the <NOFRAMES> section only. We cannot examine the pages within your frame.

Once our software has extracted this information, an abstract is created and stored in the Lycos index. Our search software ranks the search results by considering a combination of the factors listed above. Web pages with fewer than 100 words of text are less likely to be found in a Lycos search.

Read that again in case you missed anything.

Note that the Lycos spider pays close attention to the URL. So if you ever wondered if search engines took into account keywords in URLs, you now know the truth.

Another important point is that your pages should contain 100 words or more, otherwise it's unlikely to be found in Lycos.

For some unknown reason Lycos doesn't like my web pages.

There's nothing new in their reply that suggests I have not optimized my web pages in the correct manner to achieve top rankings in Lycos.

Thankfully, Google does like my pages, so I don't intend to change my pages just to cater to the Lycos ranking algorithm.

In case you're wondering, I have canceled my Lycos InSite Pro subscription. But that shouldn't come as a surprise. ;o)

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Forums – Should You Have Them On Your Website?

By Anne Moss

Article Word Count: 1096 [View Summary] Comments (0)

Forums have become a common feature in many websites. With good free scripts available, and paid scripts being relatively cheap, it seems that every new website has its own forum(s). But is it wise to add forums to your website?

In this article I'd like to take a look at the pros and cons of adding forums to your website. The largest of my websites, www.TheCatSite.com boasts one of the largest online forums on pet related subjects. In fact I have yet to see a larger forum dealing with pets. As of the writing of this article (Summer 2004), we have over 7,000 members and nearly half a million posts. In the past four years I have struggled with the hardships of community management and learned what works and what doesn't. Let me share a few insights that may help you decide if you want to take the forums path yourself.

The Pro Side of the Equation…

Forums Generate Content

Large, active forums generate content for your website. Google now has literally tens of thousands of pages indexed for TheCatSite.com's forums, and people looking for some of the more esoteric subjects related to cat health and cat behavior are very likely to meet one of our forum pages in their search results.

Forums Make People Return to Your Website

Forums are truly a "sticky" element. Most people come back, at least to check on developments on their threads. With a good community, you get some real addicts who have to get their daily fix. TheCatSite.com's forums run on Vbulletin Forums, which means members can opt to receive an email whenever someone replies to their thread. Most people use it and that little email sends them right back to the forums…

Forums Create a Sense of Community

Reaching from behind their computer screens, people from all over the world join together, get to know each other and create a community. This is actually happening! Members connect with each other, offering support in time of needs and some of them even meeting each other in real life. For you as the webmaster, this means loyal visitors that keep coming back to a place they consider to be home.

And Now To The Cons

Forums Can Take a Lot of Time to Take Off the Ground

I remember how I could feel my posts echoing in the empty board four years ago… It can take a long time before your forums pick up. An empty forum can actually drive new visitors away. It's a vicious circle – when they see that no one else is posting, they don't post themselves, and move on to the next website. It can take weeks and even months of hard work to get your forums off the ground.

Forums Need A Lot Of Ongoing Management

You need to constantly monitor your forums to make sure that they are clean of spam, troll posts, and just keep everything where it belongs. Once your forums are large enough, you have to have a team of quality moderators to help you run the place - the task being too time-consuming for one person. This is the place in this article to say "hi!" to any TCS team members reading this – thank you guys – you're the ones that make it all happen!

For the webmasters reading this article, I will say that managing a team is a task in its own right. Finding the good mods can mean the difference between success and failure. And it doesn't end there. You have to put your heart and mind to it – all the time.

Forums Take Up a Lot of Resources

Forums are database-type applications that generate web pages on the fly. Every time a user views a page, it's being created from scratch. As the forums become more active, this can take a heavy load on the web server's resources. When our forums reached 2,000 members, we had to switch over to a dedicated server. When they reached 7,000 members, we had to upgrade to a new dedicated server… With several other websites stored on our server, the forums are the big resources hoggers, taking up bandwidth, disk space and, most importantly, CPU resources. This brings us to the next point…

Forums Do Not Make Lucrative Advertising Stock

You think that with successful forums, generating millions of targeted pageviews each month, you would do well financially? Think again. Forums not only cost you a lot to run, they also don't bring in a whole lot of revenue, compared to regular web pages. Advertisers don't like to run ads on forum pages. So much so, that most CPM based ad networks won't even let you place their ads there.

Our experience with CPC ads shows that they may have a good point. Click-through rates on forum pages are significantly lower then on other types of web pages. There are ways to make your forums generate revenues, but trust me, it's not that easy. I will be writing a separate article on how we got our forums to pay for their keeping.

The Bottom Line

Forums are not for every website. Don't just put it up there and hope for the best. If you can't or don't want to put a lot of time and effort into creating a viable community, just leave it. Having no forums is better than having dead forums. Having dead forums on your website may actually drive people away.

Research your field. How easy will it be to create a community geared towards the subject of your website? Is it something that people want to talk about with each other? Are there other forums on this subject? How are they doing?

Get your feet wet. Join several forums and become an active participant. If possible, become a team member or a moderator in a large forum. Big forums often have secret team forums, where you can learn a lot about community management.

Think ahead. Where do you see your website in a year or two? Is this your main project and passion? Will you have the time and energy it takes to maintain a forum? Above all: Will you enjoy it?

About The Author

Anne Moss has been the webmaster of www.TheCatSite.com and www.Meowhoo.com, as well as several other sites, since the year 2000. You can read more advice for webmasters on her webmasters resources website –www.4NetNeeds.com.

You may use this article in your website, provided that you leave the "About the Author" bit intact and make sure that the names of the websites mentioned are clickable and lead to the right place.

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