kanetrain - 10:44 pm on Dec 9, 2003 (gmt 0)

One of my urls is dropped completely for Hotbot and for Pure Search at Positiontech, but shows up fine in MSN.

I would love to go with trusted feed, but I disagree fundamentally with the idea of mixing PPC results with regular search results and my ROI just won't support the click-throgh rates... not even close actually. If I had a separate listing that was marked as "sponsored" and still had "free" listings, I would probably do trusted feed.

Anyway... as an update, it appears that they have been able to restore historical data but the loads of dropped sites are still dropped.

I finally got ahold of a rep at Inktomi and spoke extensively about the problem. Let me say... it pays to have a contact within Yahoo. He told me that he didn't know what was causing the problem and that he didn't know if it was a PT problem or not, but that it could be.

I explained my deep frustrations with PT and how they seem to get sites excluded and not included and do not respond when the problems surface. I told him it took 5 months to get my last issue resolved. He was concerned about this. I am calling back later today or tomorrow morning with my attorney to file a formal complaint with a supervisor over there and talk about the next step.

Teh thing that is so @#@$@# assinine about Ink and PT and that whole mess is that they only do this to PFI pages. In other words, these problems only occur if you pay to be in the index. It will never happen to pages that are indexed for fee. How bassackwards is that.

With PT, you really are paying for exclusion. Maybe not initially, but eventually yes.

I really think it is a ploy to slowly turn people away from free listing and get them to sign up for trusted feed and pay per click. They will try to up-sell you and tell you that with Trusted Feed you will get better reporting and support etc. etc.

They'll just squeez you out and demand more.