Forum Moderators: open
Who has had this experience? And if you had it to do over and knew you would have your site dropped, would you pay again?
-s-
Ever buy a car and when you go to take delivery the mats are gone and the dealer offers to "sell" you a new set?
We purchased two pages to experiment with and in short order INK flushed all but the home page and the paid pages. Needless to say they and we have moved on to more reliable sources of traffic.
Their site has turned out to be an unbelievable success story, but that would need to be posted in Overture and Google's forums.
The site is a very mild example - there are a lot worse cases of INK killing sites out there. (removed by stcrim 03/08/02)
Tim, did I just let the fox into the hen house or are you going to really be helpful and get this corrected - and give people back the pages they had in before paying.
-s-
(edited by: stcrim at 1:44 pm (utc) on Mar. 8, 2002)
Not a good deal, plus with all the termoil...who knows where and how long INK will show on other engines.
I thinks I'll leave it.
Are the free pages distributed as much as the free listings on INK.
P.S. Watch this space. I've heard ask, dh and teoma might be doing a deal with INK. If successful they will be a decent why to get listed in INK for free. I'll keep my ear to the ground and let you know.
But something changed. None of my paid listings are getting more than a handful of visitors each day, some days none at all, and none of my other pages are anywhere to be found in Inktomi.
I'd sure like to know what happened and why. For a while I considered my Inktomi listings one of the best business investments I had made in ages. Not these days, though!
After 3 months of near orgasmic pleasure the whole site was trashed by INK. The domain name is trash. Nothing I have tried can bring this horse back from the dead. Nothing.
I am "s l o w l y" putting these pages up spread over several new domains and am getting ranked again. This time around I'm not cloaking and use a .js file to redirect. This time around I am ranking them #2-#5 with different doorway pages - being careful not to parallel what I did before. All pages are search term relevant and point direct to counterpart pages on a database driven site.
If this many people here have had the problem, how many thousands of people were trusting on INK and got their sites trashed?
-s-
I appreciate your interest! But, I am not looking to have my personal situation corrected but rather some disclosure here as to INK's position is.
Publicly INK has been claiming this isn't happening, but we (including your tech staff) know it is.
The fact that sites have been trashed by paying for URLs is not in question. What is in question is:
1. What is Ink going to do about all the trashed sites, if anything...
2. What is their policy going to be on this situation in the future?
-s-
Do not pay for a page on any site that has non-paid pages in the index...
-s-
minnapple - thanks for the testing...
-s-
However, I agree with NFFC - don't submit paid pages on sites which are already listed well for free - it can cause grief. The site I have done this on was a test and I wouldn't do it again - even though I haven't lost pages - it still causes me some other problems.
Or, you might want to check with your technical team for instructions.
Inktomi has a non-public site that when the url is typed in reveals if a page is paid or not (or maybe it's so secret only the SEO community knows about it)
-s-
You are basically insulting the collective intelligence of most of the members here. It is a widely known fact that participating in your PFI program results in the removal of your unpaid pages.
This is not an isolated incident, it is policy.
If it is not the policy of INK, it may be that you have some rogue "partners" that have access to the BOW db and do with it what they will.
I think it would go along way here if you were to just fess up and rectify the issue publicly.
Ever play that game of whisper your neighbor a story? By the time it gets down the 8th or 9th person, the story has changed? That's the way it is in corporations too.
Not on my site. I have a lot of free pages and a few paid pages. The free pages were in Ink all along. When I submitted some new paid pages, I could see no impact whatsoever, plus or minus, on the free pages.
I'm pleased that Tim is participating in this forum. I think we are all very fortunate that he is willing to look into this problem. There's been a number of people reporting this problem so it certainly appears real, but does not affect all sites or mine would have been trashed.
Background of trashed Doorway site:
I refer to my earlier post regarding a doorway site that was trashed. This site comprised of optimised pages for products within a competitive keyword category. As previously mentioned, all were IP cloaked. Approximately 20% of each page contained random text pulled from a somewhat large random text file of keyword phrases so as not to have pages that were too similar. The pages , however, were all "keyword stuffed" following the usual formula to rank pages in INK. The doorway site pointed to an e-commerce site.
Background of E-Commerce site:
Some 3500 products all within the same competitive business. No shopping mall with diverse, unrelated products. Site designed using PHP/MySQL. Never had an HTM/HTML product page of it's own. Always fed by doorway pages. It was done this way, of course, so as not to get the e-commerce site banned should INK tighten up on their policies - which is what happened. Had I not done so, I would not be writing this today as my client would have probably put a contract out on me.
New approch and resolution to problem:
Since the loss of the doorway site I spread the pages out over several new domains and did not IP cloak. Neither was I so "greedy" as the first time. I optimised all pages not for #1-3 positions as before but for #3-5 positions. I figured that if I could at least get back in the game I could later strategically tweak up, at will, certain pages of more importance. They still point to the same e-commerce site. All is going along exactly to plan.
Neutered site:
Since the loss of the doorway site I have, as part of my new approach, selectively placed optimised pages on the e-commerce site itself. I cannot get any HTM/HTML page to rank on that site. I have tried over a dozen versions of pages over the same number of keywords and still come up bumpkis. The same, exact pages that currently rank high on a new doorway come up bumpkis when placed on the e-commerce domain. All HTM/HTML pages put up on the e-commerce site now respond exactly the same. The page is read, it is placed in the optimised keyword category, but only the title and description of the index page are used. Yes, I get ranked in that keyword category but in positions #15-25. I cannot get INK to use the title, description and keyword data of the optimised page(the only things of real importance to INK).
Conclusion:
All the above was coincidental with the inclusion of Overture in MSN search results. INK, wanting to keep MSN happy with them and not wanting to be replaced by Google, cleaned out the top positions of competitive "money keyword" categories so the Overture listings would enjoy little competition. It was not enough just to put the Overture listings above the same results (as competitors would still be next to them), they had to eliminate, trash and purge. Whatever it took to make MSN happy. Without MSN there is no INK. They would find themselves accomodating the demands of their remaining partners just to keep them.
Doesn't this seem like the behavior of one engaged in the "oldest profession in the world"?
I did not notice any negative effects. Actually got more pages listed for free on a few domains after paying for a few pages.
I hope I get to meet you some day. My hat's off to ya and the "right on" post you just left...
-s-
Nell- if you think you have been demoted and have cleaned up your act you should email spamcrusader@inktomi.com and ask for the site to be reviewed. If it looks okay he will remove the demotion. I dont know what your domain is so it is impossible for me to tell you if you have been penalized.
In like kind, if Inktomi cleans up it's act and I give it a favorable review I may remove my demotion of it.
I have no problem playing by the rules if the other players(my competitors) do so. However, anyone who plays it straight in a card game with cheaters can only expect to walk away a loser unless they also cheat a little themselves. That makes the game difficult in itself without the dealer(INK) adding to the equasion by randomly changing the rules without notice - usually to benefit the high roll players.
Meanwhile, there are other games out there beside Inktomi. Games where one can play straight. Games where the best player, and not the best cheater, wins.
Oh my that is so very funny!
Anyway, lets cut Tim a break, looks like he may be trying to help out here and of course he is now a wmw member, we always treat all members with respect.
On one site, it may be worth losing the unpaid. It's got the ODP title and description from the site owner's submission, with name,inc. as the title and the exact keyword phrase at the beginning of the description (owner chosen). But it's totally worthless for that for any traffic, so it would pay in this case to give up the free listing to get the right title and description.
