panic - 9:46 pm on Feb 16, 2004 (gmt 0)

I was actually told from an Ink guy that my index page had a penalty. If the penalty was on my entire domain, then I would think that none of my pages would appear in searches.

Not true. If you paid for your page to be included, you'll be dead last for just about any/every term, but your page will still be in the index. If your site was crawled/indexed for free, THEN you'll be kicked out of the index.

1. Editorial Spam Penalties (your whole site is gone). The dreaded Inktomi blacklist. If your blacklisted and your whole site is gone... that might be the kiss of death.

Again, it's only gone if your site was indexed for free.

I truly have no idea why the spam penalty would have been placed in the first place, but I think it's there.

Did those certain people ever get back to you to let you know if your domain was slapped with an editorial action?

I can't even find a telephone number on their entire website, (even their search engine website for that matter).

They don't give out the number that easily. :)

Who in the world would deal with a company (like Ink/FAST) who charges for what most others give away for free, screws things up worse than they were when you started, ignore or refuse to respond to e-mails and make it nearly impossible to get in phone contact with them?

It's not impossible for ME to get in contact with them, so I don't think generalizing and saying that no one can get in contact with them is unjust.