daveclarke - 8:08 pm on Feb 24, 2004 (gmt 0)

I believe this is the case. Recently, my redirected page (steelrail.net) ranked at the top for the search "steel rail" "official site", while the actual home page (steelrail.ca) was at the bottom. And of course, neither actually shows up in the search for "steel rail".

My search submission partner, bCentral, has grudgingly admitted that this is a problem, despite the fact that Ink's own guidelines say that gtld's redirected to the main web site are acceptable and indeed common practice.

Of course, even if I could get steelrail.net removed from the index and then took it offline, there is no guarantee that steelrail.ca would come out of the doghouse. And of course Inktomi and their search submit partners refuse to deal with this problem, although at least bCentral did acknowledge the problem (after many frustrating exchanges). By the way, PositionTech did not even do that much.

It's all very frustrating. At this point I am ready to support any campaign to urge the public to boycott Inktomi-based search engines (e.g. msn.com), and to switch to Google when Yahoo goes to Inktomi (does anyone know when this is happening?). I belive this will happen anyway, because Inktomi has so many problems that Yahoo will be unable to hold onto their share for very long after cutover.