kanetrain - 12:59 am on Mar 17, 2004 (gmt 0)

Mike - Could you please address the issue of the vanishing homepage PFI problem? Many webmasters (such as flobaby) are noticing that their PFI pages have disappeared and in their place are dupe content links and 301 redirects. This, according to Yahoo, is an indication that the site (or page) has some kind of penalty... but all of the Inktomi resellers swear that it is not a penalty or ban of any kind at all. In fact, Positiontech still swears to me that my site has no ban on it of any kind, while Tim has made it very clear that my site does. Many of us have gotten so many mixed signals, it's disturbing. It's like dating a girl with multiple personality disorder. I now know for sure that, from what Tim has said, that the vanishing PFI homepage issue is indeed some kind of penalty and I am patiently (5 months now) waiting for resolution.

Could you please go into some detail on the difference between the vanishing homepage penalty and a regular editorial ban? What triggers each one etc.?

From my research, I have found evidence that the vanishing homepage ban is an automated penalty that hits only PFI pages and an editorial ban is a penalty that will drop the entire site from the index. Both are "eternal" bans. Is this accurate? If so, why are PFI pages treated differently than organic results if, in therory, they are supposed to be treated the same? Positiontech swore to me many times that PFI pages were treated the exact same... and yet... only PFI pages are hit with the vanishing homepage curse... in fact, my site's homepage disappeared immediately after signing up for PFI and is still gone.

How can you justify dropping all Inktomi PFI pages from the Yahoo index, while still keeping all of the Inktomi penalties from before? That sounds a little unfair especially given the fact that the Inktomi penalty system was sketchy at best (as I obviously know from personal experience).