panic - 8:40 pm on Feb 17, 2004 (gmt 0)

Um [aghast] Oh come on! I'm talking about ANY poor schmuck who clicks on the Lycos, "Submit Site" link, honestly believes their drivel enough to give them their credit card info (because there is no longer a way to FREE submit without paying for at least one PFI). Remember all THOSE people, who if it wasn't for them, submit partners (apparently like yourself?) wouldn't be in business?

You should be able to go straight to your portal/reseller that you paid (Lycos, in this case), and ask THEM your problem, not Inktomi. Just because an Inktomi portal/reseller/etc portal is incompetent, that doesn't mean that Inktomi is.

Spare the Yiddish, too.

Uh-duh, it claims they are so "committed" to supporting PAYING customers, then turns around and says, but WE'RE not actually going to support PAYING customers, only those who keep the PAYING customers off our backs.

Again, that implies that they help your portal/reseller contacts them.

Ah-ha, now YOU'RE the funny one. I just finished saying it took me 6 e-mails just to get beyond the form-mail responses, and finally to a supposedly live and supposedly Ink-authorized person at NetSol, (i.e. the top level with whom, I as a mere lowly, paying submitter, and not worthy of actually communicating DIRECTLY with the ilk of Ink, was to be once-in-a-lifetime-blessed with an utterance from) and then I'm to expect a second response after challanging their all-knowing intelligence. :)

All you had to ask was who they spoke to.

What if the disturber isn't even aware he's making a disturbance? Now you're sounding like one of them no-tolerance... ahem's. It's like that school kid who got kicked out of school this week for wearing the City of Climax T-shirt which the city itself printed! (Google it if you haven't heard about it)

That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. "What if the disturber isn't even aware he's making a disturbance?" How could you possibly not be aware that you're creating a disturbance? If they lack the common sense to even know that what they're doing is wrong, they've got places for those type of people (it's just one bus ride away).

"Now you're sounding like one of them no-tolerance... ahem's." Sounding like? I AM one of those people, but I don't see why I would have to tolerate spammers, cheaters, etc who not only degrade the quality of search results, but search engine marketing as a whole.

Sorry, no sympathy there. :)

But you're not being forced to pay someone for doing it! If I PFI, I expect to get what was promised. If they can't or won't deliver they need simply say why and/or refund.

Correct me if I'm wrong here, but didn't you get what you paid for? You paid to have your site crawled/indexed on a regular basis, and you got your site crawled/indexed on a regular basis. Was there any gurantee that you'd get better placement? No.

I just re-read their terms of service. Nowhere are the words penalty, ban, multiple content, spam or any other reason for arbitrarily penalizing a site mentioned. It DOES however claim that all sites are ranked equally by their algorithm, which IS against their terms if there is a MANUAL PENALTY involved!

All the more power to you then. Take Ink to court... I'd love to see you try.

Now you're talking nonsense. I was referring to those who submitted an address for PAID INCLUSION. When you do this you GIVE THEM all your contact info where they can send a simple response. They also return a status code to your submission manager page. They could just as easily send a code or message there. Sorry, no sympathy there.

Again, I don't think they need to go out of their way to appease someone who has broken their terms of service.

Huh? I was paraphrasing an ACTUAL form-letter response e-mailed from NetSol, the people who I submitted to Inktomi through... Unbelievable indeed isn't it?

I bet.

Spamming: Bad SEO advice, corrected by a future SEO. Bad rumor mill tip. Remember at one time in the late 90's spamming was the ONLY way to get seen under certain competitive terms. EVERYONE was doing it. I didn't see an official notice when Inktomi finally fixed their filter. Were all the non-spamming sites just supposed to sit back and dry up as their competitors broke the rules. Now it's no longer necessary, so most people have stopped.

Not everyone spammed, contrary to what you think. You didn't see an official notice when Inktomi fixed their filter? That's because there wasn't one. Why wasn't there one? There didn't need to be one.

"Were all the non-spamming sites just supposed to sit back and dry up as their competitors broke the rules." No... they sit back and wait for their competitors to get busted, and laugh when they did.

Duplication: Accidental copying of an updated index page into the wrong subdirectory. Transferring domains. I've read Soo many messages from people on this very website who still do not know how to use 301 redirect! Or for that matter if Inktomi and FAST handle it correctly. For instance if you submit a 301 redirect page into the spider submit field on Lycos it rejects it! Besides it could be as long as a year for Ink to revisit the old site to realize it's not there and remove it. In the mean time there is now an entire site duplicated. Shoot this could have been what happened in our case. We used to be hosted at a large ISP that got taken over. Some of our pages (remember the good ole days, 1996) were still multiply indexed as IP address paths, alternate addresses (www.isp-address.com/~our-domain/index.htm), as well as the actual domain all pointing to the same page. When we moved, the domain moved too, but all those other pages were still in the index since they never re-crawl free pages, and I even noticed a couple still in there to this day! What about someone who moves to an entirely new domain name? Or say from a free hosting site to a custom domain? Do they need to change every single page? This sounds like a serious Inktomi flaw.

"Accidental copying of an updated index page into the wrong subdirectory." That would imply that the site is sloppy. I don't think anyone would want to see a sloppy page at the top of the SERPS.

"Transferring domains." Use a 301 redirect.

"I've read Soo many messages from people on this very website who still do not know how to use 301 redirect!" They need to learn it, now don't they?

"Or for that matter if Inktomi and FAST handle it correctly." They do. They always follow MY redirects.

"For instance if you submit a 301 redirect page into the spider submit field on Lycos it rejects it!" Could it possibly be because you're supposed to submit the NEW URL that the 301 is pointing to? Oh, of course not.

"Besides it could be as long as a year for Ink to revisit the old site to realize it's not there and remove it." Hasn't been the case with me, but if it hasn't visited in a year, that means the site has had no changes and is either done or has stale content. Don't blame Inktomi for not visiting your non-changing page every day. And besides, why would someone just move a site with old/stale content to a new domain in the first place?

"Or say from a free hosting site to a custom domain?" That's why you delete all pages from the old address, and put a link to the new page on the index page (with an optional 301 meta refresh) and a message saying that the site has been moved. Inktomi is human edited, and the editors will see that you've moved your site. Simple as that.

If this is true then my PR7 competitor can copy my original PR5 page from my PR6 site to a page on his site, point a bunch of his PR7/PR6 pages to it or simply replace an already highly externally linked PR6 page on his site with it, and voila he is now the "official duplicate". Then I get banned, he makes lots of money off of it to defend against me while I can't any longer afford to pay an attorney to file a copyright infringement case. Doesn't sound very fair to me. Another Ink flaw.

Considering PR (PageRank) is for Google, I don't see how the PageRank would matter. However, if by that you mean their placement in the SERPS, that's a different story. There are rare occasions where this happens, but I'm guessing that Ink editorial would compare the original dates that the pages with the content were initially crawled. I'm not sure exactly how they do it, but more often than not, the "good guy" comes out on top.

Noone would, intentionally. But again, imagine your average schmo who thinks up and registers what he thinks is a lucky find. Developes a whole site, then submits (free or WORSE YET PFI ahhh!), spends hours, days, weeks, exchanging perfectly honest links with others (whom I guess also get hurt because of linking to his penalty), and then waits, and waits. Only to eventually discover it was banned before he even started. I don't see any posted list out there with names of banned domains. Come on not everyone who develops websites on the internet visits this website, or knows what a penalty is. In fact most of the visitors to this website probably didn't even know until this post was started (shoot even customer support at NetSol doesn't appear to know to this day!)

Starting without any research is just asking for failure. I'm not sure how a non-paying customer would go about getting their bans/editorials lifted, but paying customers just need to get in touch with their portal/reseller and have them ask.

Ah-ha! I'm glad you admit that... He-he, which brings us back to the start. HOW does one contact Inktomi for oneself?! :)

That seems to be the million dollar question, now doesn't it? ;)

Yeah, Panic you act like you have the inside track on everything, answer the fellow's question.

Oh sure... since outland88 (whoever that is) is telling me to give out Inktomi contact information, I think I pretty much have to. Why don't I just give out my whole address book while I'm at it?