My paid included pages didn't even last 2 weeks

Dropped from top 3 rank to 30+ after I added more pages

[erickoh]

I'm the webmaster of a japanese celebrity website, with each celebrity having her own folder after the domain name.

The first time, I paid to include me.com/, me.com/A, me.com/B and me.com/C. The last 3 pages ranked very well, but not my domain root index page.

Anyway, I was quite happy, and after 1 week I paid to get me.com/D /E /F inside the ink database. D & E ranked well, but not F

Yet another week later, I put in /G /H /I /J. The 4 new ones rank well, but pages A through F got buried completely.

A search for celebrity A returns pages G H I J ranked much higher that A itself, which is quite ridiculous since all pages are script generated and are very similar (besides the name,profile info of celebrity etc)

So is it a policy for ink to rank newly included pages high up for a while before dropping them, or are there some other plausible explanation?

I waited for the next refresh but results remains like that. Is there a way perhaps to get my sites off the database for a while, then include them back again?

Eric
[snip url]

[stcrim]

erickoh,

Welcome to WMW and the INKTOMI forums. The INK database(s) have had many changes over the past few weeks. You could have been ranking well and then caught in one of the changes. You might benefit from looking closely at the pages ranking above you.

Since paying only gives you inclusion we may all be fighting for ranking everytime they make changes. That is one of the reason I can't bring myself to pay to play.

-s-

[vis]

Sounds like there might be an issue with the submitted pages looking like duplicate content to Ink. The shared elements would make each page seem like a near copy of another and could cause a rankings drop for all affected pages.

[Jill]

Steve:

Does the ranking on paid Ink pages rely soley upon what is on that particular page, or does link popularity or traffic to that page have anything to do with where it lands?

Jill

[stcrim]

Jill,

My own test lead me to believe it is based on that page alone.

-s-

[celtic gnome]

Good question Jill and I have one that may be a spin off of that. When Inktomi sees my redirects, is it reading the redirect pages or where the redirects are pointing? I think most engines read the actual redirect pages, but it seems like you are saying that there is a possibility of the main site being read. I am probably just confused over your above inference that your tests prove its the actual page and indirectly saying that its possible for the spiders to actually read the site I am pointing to? Thanks for clearing up my muddled thinking.

the gnome

[erickoh]

An update:

Previously all my pages had many similar key terms and some common navigation bars, all with the same links. As a result, a search usually returns all my pages very closely ranked together (actually, just the latest 5 submitted pages, the rest got buried way behind)

I changed the contents of some of the buried pages DRASTICALLY, and they re-surfaced again in the next inktomi update.

Hope that helps any of you in the same situation as I was.

Cheers!