Pay for one INK page and have 100 dropped?

[stcrim]

Just about every day I hear from someone who paid for a few pages in hopes of improving their rankings only to find out that INK dropped all their (so called BOW) pages.

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?

[webguybri]

Question....

I use position tech for my ink submissions for web site www.******.com I have about 30 pages from my site in PT. They all get updated with no problem.

Except for the home page. I just checked and it is using the looksmart title & description.... A few weeks ago it was not.

I have been using position tech for this domain for over a year.

Could this mean that my main page is in BOW?

Sorry if this is off topic.

:)

[stcrim]

webguybri

Welcome - there is a lot of talk over here about ink using the LS descriptions. I doubt you are now in the "old database" (some people also call the bow) if you were not in it before.

-s-

[minnapple]

<prev>I submitted a page on Tuesday.
I recorded the rankings on a sizeable amount of search results listing "free pages".
I am going to track and document what happens.
I have saved the (before) Pure Search results as part of documentation.
I will publish the information in some venue if it is newsworthy.</prev>

Update on page sumbitted on March 5th.
The "free pages" were spidered along with the paid page and were indexed/re-indexed.

I know this because I had changed the title and descriptions on these pages on March 3rd and these changes are reflected in the current listings.

Of course there is a change in rankings on the "free pages" because of this.

Some to the good some to the bad.

Free pages and paid pages are from the same domain.

[click watcher]

haven't done a full investigation,

but just checking some pt stuff today and noticed new pages in the ink database that i haven't even free submitted, just been picked up by spidering,
not ranking highly but they weren't meant for ink anyway.

not sure when they were spidered as i haven't analysed the logs yet but the pages were new on the server 15th feb. (they are linked to from pages in the BOW)

[herb]

Bump... Still waiting for an answer from Tim

[chiyo]

I think Tim might have been scared away. His reception was hardly welcoming.

[nowhere]

stcrim - Any chance of getting you to share that secret paid/non-paid site?

[tedster]

> Tim may have been scared away

It also might take more than 5 days for him to cut through everything he needs to give us an answer. I do hope we hear something, because these reports are disturbing -- and at the same time there are other reports of no problems at all.

I've got clients right now who want to pay for spidering, but I'm holding off if they have any pages generating traffic from the BOW. I'm little bit gunshy right now, as I'm sure others are, given this kind of report coming from more than one direction.

Hoping for some clarity, as soon as Tim can provide it.

[Marcia]

nowhere, you can see which are paid or free by mousing over the links at MSN search.

[tigger]

Marcia

I always assumed the paid ink pages were the ones that displayed redirect-west.inktomi.com on mouse over and the free one's just displayed the URL

[herb]

<< I am looking into this problem and have noticed that something is not quite right. Will update you when we have it fixed.<<

Have a few that are expiring first week of next month. Would hope that Tim comes back with an answer before than. Had about 10-12 that went under water and don't think I want to renew the ones comming up with the same result.

Tim, are you still working on this?

[Tim]

I have been looking into it and havent been able to see a problem as of yet. I need some examples to diagnose. Please stickymail me so I can look into it.

[Tim]

I have diagnosed the problem and we are implementing a fix for this. I am not sure that this would have affected your rankings dramatically though. Thanks for reporting this Steve and for the example.
Tim

[stcrim]

Thanks Tim

-s-

[mayor]

Tim, might it be possible to elaborate a bit on what you found, like the extent of the problem and why some sites might be affected and others not, and when this will be fixed?

[Tim]

Yes I will let you know when it is fixed. It is in process now and shouldn't take too long. I cant really go into the details of the problem. The problem was not very serious and should not have a significant impact on rankings of Search Submit URLs.

[stcrim]

Tim - any chance that the pages that were removed will be put back into the database or will this fix just prevent future pages from being removed when a paid page is added?

-s-

[Tim]

Steve,
The example you gave me had an unpaid root page and two paid pages from the same site. The fix will affect the ranking of the two paid pages slightly but this does not have anything to do with the dropping of pages or deletion of spam.
Tim

[minnapple]

I am somewhat confused.
Tim, is your reponse addressing one isolated incident or is this a global change?

[Tim]

It is a global change. It is scheduled for completion on Friday and will roll over the weekend. It affects Search Submit URLs.
Tim

[minnapple]

As an Inclusion client, what may I expect to see?
Stickymail me if my question is too vague.

[TomWaits]

For a site that had approx 200 free pages in Ink, we then paid for 8 pages early last year. Nothing bad ever happened. No free pages were dropped. One good thing that came out of it was that for some of the pages, they had unfortunately indexed 1 domain name pointer, and for the rest they had indexed our intended domain name. It was like that for a couple of years. The paid submit seemed to clear up the spidering confusion and now all the pages are in under 1 domain name.

I know this is a contentious point, but in our case the paid pages got a boost in the results. In 1 case, we went from #3-#5 to #1, and have remained at #1, and I attribute it to paying. Maybe there are ancillary reasons like they started paying more attention to our inbound links, or whatever. It's real, though, and I didn't care why.

[jilla]

I too have noticed that I lost free pages I had indexed after paying. Has this been now rectified where one won't have to risk paying for a page on a domain and losing already indexed free pages?

[tigger]

I've been wondering the same jilla, perhaps tim could come back and confirm this

[adamxcl]

I'm holding off paying for anything... I have thousands of free pages in the index. I can't pay for them all. So I pay for a couple and then lose the rest? I can't take the slightest risk on that. I can't pay for anything with them unless I had a sure thing that they aren't pulling other pages.