Big drop in Ink traffic

Is Ink dumping sites?

[mayor]

I have a site that has been drawing good traffic from Ink partners for a couple of years. I rarely change anything on the site and haven't added a single new page in about a year.

Today, I suddenly suffered about a 90% drop in traffic from the Ink partners.

I have a similar second site that has not been affected at all (at least not yet).

Anyone else have a site get trashed by Ink today?

[DrCool]

I checked a few of my sites that get good Inktomi traffic and have seen nothing drop off today.

Are you using a pay-for-spidering service and your site was down when the spiders came around? That is one possibility I have had happen in the past.

[mayor]

No, DrCool, there's no pay for spidering at all on this site.

[nell]

You have probably just answered your own question.

[mayor]

Maybe so, Nell. But I went from about 500 pages indexed to 5 pages indexed. There's nothing special about the five pages that survived.

I would think if Ink were going to purge non-paid sites they would wipe out even those last five pages.

And if Ink were purging non-paid sites I'll bet this thread would already be a real hot one.

[Marcia]

You might want to check out this recent thread about the Inktomi BOW update [webmasterworld.com].

[mayor]

Thanks for the suggestion Marcia.

I don't use Looksmart. Never have.

Now here's a real brain teaser ... when I mouseover the MSN serps of the pages that survived, I see the redirect-west url ... but I never submitted these pages to the paid inclusion program. I never submitted a single page on this site. Is it possible someone else submitted them for me ????? And if they did, would that cause the rest of my site to get wiped out from the DB? I was of the impression this would not happen.

Tim, or Jim, are you listening? Any insight into this event?

[nell]

If a competitor paid for and submitted 5 of your pages you could expect all remaining free listings to disappear. There have been threads on this before.

from stcrim:
"I personally have lost whole sites by paying for single pages"

[webmasterworld.com...]

[mayor]

Anyone have a clue how I can find out who paid to submit my pages to Inktomi without my approval?

[nell]

If this was something done maliciously consider the following:

(a) Who would piss $125 away unless they knew that, in doing so, they would cause you considerable damage? In other words, who knew that you did have 500+ pages on that site? A competitor wouldn't know that.

(b) Nor would a competitor know that these 500+ pages were in for free.

(c) Nor would a competitor really benefit from trashing your 500+ pages. No competitor sells exactly what you do and is ranked along side each of these 500+ pages. Even if you were eliminated there would be many others to deal with. Eliminating you doesn't give them some monopoly. It's not a practical way to a gain competitive advantage.

(d) It had to have been done by someone that knows that this dirty trick would work. The average person isn't aware that doing such a thing is damaging. In fact, they would probably believe the reverse. They would hardly be inclined to spend $125 on paid advertising for you.

I would focus on someone technically knowledgeable, that has detailed information on this particular site.
Perhaps a disgruntled ex-employee of yours or one from the company who owns the site?

[crobb305]

mayor,

You could contact each of the resellers for Inktomi (I think there are 5 including Positiontech, Verisign, Ineedhits, etc..) and see if someone submitted to Inktomi through them.

[mayor]

>> (a) Who would piss $125 away >>

Well, maybe they aren't pissing away $125. Maybe they're going to edit those URL's to point at the next site ranking above them and keep doing this to get a lot of milage out of $125.

I try not to be paranoid about these happenings, and I have little reason to be paranoid because I don't go for highly competitive keywords, but I have to ask myself how else these pages got tagged with redirect-west. Maybe there's some strange bug in Inktomi, but no one else has reported this.

I hope that anyone else suffering a big drop in Inktomi checks to see if their surviving pages are tagged with redirect-west when they didn't pay to have them spidered.

[mayor]

Just an update .... the five surviving pages from this ordeal recently disappeared from the Inktomi data base ... about 48 hours after they were tagged as redirect-west. So it does look like someone might have malicously submitted five pages on my site to the paid inclusion program, causing the rest of my site to disappear from the Ink DB, then edited the five submissions to replace them with another URL, causing those five to disappear also.

So my next question is ... any suggestions how to get a whole site back into the Ink DB after being booted by inclusion in the paid spidering program?

Mayors own edit .... I have received a sticky mail from Jim Staub (Position Technologies) who says submitting to Ink paid-inclusion doesn't cause the rest of the site to be purged from the db. I'm sure Jim will cast some light on this ordeal and I will let the forum know how this turns out.

[nell]

>suggestions how to get a whole site back into the Ink DB after being booted<

1 page @$39/page = $39.00
499 pages @$25/page = $11,475.00

Total = $12,514.00

[nell]

Check the log files of each of those 5 paid pages over the last day or so. Look for a repeating IP address across all 5 of them. Whoever did such a thing were possibly tempted to click on their "evil deed".

It would be unlikely that any legitimate person would have a reason to visit each and all of those 5 pages.

Conclusively, the same IP address showing not once, but repeatedly in all 5 pages.

[mayor]

Excellent idea, Nell, and I do have the log files saved away. Thanks!

[mayor]

< a few hours later >

Painstakingly searched the log files for an ip address across all five suspect url's. Nada!

At least now I feel better no longer thinking it likely a fellow web person found a hole in the Ink paid-submission program and used it to trash my site.

So the question remains ... how did those five pages wind up in the redirect-west db on their way to Inktomi oblivion?

I thank everyone that is or has tried to help me in this moment of grief.