Re-submit

[adamcmoran]

For one client they were out on the Thursday and due a position report on the Monday
I paniced and resubmitted monday morning they were back in

So this would tend to suggest that re-submitting is not bad who knows but the main problem is with the clients it is impossible to explain to them why they arre in one day and then not another day.....
Has anyone come up with a good excuse yet as to what to tell a customer when they are dropped.

I wouldn't mind if it was just one search engine but as inktomi serves tons and tons of other search engines then it is really messing up marketing campaigns.

I know there is no gurantee with search engines but surely they can perform better than this.
I personally think that it has two databases and rotates between then every second week.??

Probably not

ADAM 8-)

[Rockintom]

Rather than come up with excuses, I tell my client that this type of erratic behaviour by search engines like Inktomi is exactly the reason they need our services! If all we had to do was optimize once, submit once, and belly up to the bar, I think our clients would be dropping like flies.
I'm not suggesting that your clients will be happy with this, but it's worth a shot to try and pull a positive out of this Inktomi fiasco.
Good luck!

[littleman]

Rockintom - Good advice!
... and welcome to the forums.

[jrjr]

i think that is wonderful advice. it is so true, i was beginning to doubt the importance of seo w/all the recent crap.

-jr

[rcjordan]

>beginning to doubt the importance of seo

If you've been around SE's for a while, the recent INK screw-up/rejiggering/upheaval/purge/whatever (select the appropriate term based on how much your traffic dropped) could be a mirror of AV's 'Black Monday' or dozens of other times the SEO sky has fallen. You take your lumps on one, make time on the others --the important part to pick up from all of this is that those who depend too heavily on one or two SE's to provide traffic are going to suffer every now and then.

[Rockintom]

Thanks, littleman. I've been lurking here for quite a while, and while I don't feel confident enough in my SEO abilities to attempt to advise someone, my years in sales management have taught me well on how to turn a negative into a positive.
I also firmly believe we're worth every penny (and I do mean penny ;-)) they pay us!
Better days are coming!

[tigger]

My best approach when clients ask me why their rankings have gone, is to completely honest and say "I don't know" and let's face WE DON'T, followed very quickley with" but,neither does any one else.

I normally also direct them to some of inktomi's SE's usally freeserve/msn and ask them to do a search, after a little coaching about dates/returns and how to search correctly they can see things aren't well

So far I've only lost one client and that was yet another double glazing company, the others are holding on but only as I also have them ranked with AV/NL/GOOGLE

not getting much luck getting them into fast :(

[NFFC]

>I don't feel confident enough in my SEO abilities to attempt to advise someone, my years in sales management have taught me well on how to turn a negative into a positive.

There's a lot more to SEO than meta tags, your advice is both pertinent and welcome.

[stcrim]

Rockintom and jrjr,

Welcome to the INKTOMI forum and WMW. Sorry this greeting has to be under the current fun and games by INKTOMI.

Worth noting, we have identical pages in the old and new (or big and little) databases. The old pages rank well as they always have. The new ones are off the radar.

We even have some old blue_line WPG pages that we just have not had time to clean up that are ranking very well.

Submitted 200 plus pages a couple of days ago (all with the same old algo that's ranking well in the older database) All are now indexed and ranking very poorly.

That says to me that INKTOMI is (a.) working on the databases or (b.) they really want google to take over all their business.

Let's face it - it's things like this that keep this job interesting.

Steve

[jrjr]

interesting indeed but stressful! :)