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

Last Update: Thursday, May 25, 2006.

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)

About The Author: Michael Wong is an internationally recognized search engine marketing expert, and the author of a leading search engine book, numerous marketing tips, and reviews of internet marketing software and ecommerce solutions.