picked up by MSN for amonth (w/o paying), and then dropped

[ebess]

I have a site which I did not pay for inclusion in Ink, although I was getting spidered by slurp alot. Starting January 8th, MSN started sending about 1700 uniques a day to my site, and not just through the home page, either, but to hundreds of subpages on the site.

Needless to say, I was thrilled!

But now I am getting NO traffic at all from MSN or any of the other Ink partners. January 30th was the last day of traffic from them :(

Anyone have any idea why Inktomi would pick up my entire site for inclusion in the directory, and send lots of traffic (which obviously felt they'd found what they had searched for seeing as how sales went up dramatically) -- only to drop the site entirely 3 weeks later?

And, more importantly, aside from paying a fortune to have my whole site indexed, does anyone know how I can get my site listed again? Is there a possibility (hoping & praying!) that this is a temporary glitch and the new database will kick back in again with my site? Or is that useless dreaming on my part?

I was so excited, but now I'm just sad <sigh>

Any help, comments, etc, would be appreciated!

Thx!
-ebess-

[SEOPTI]

Stop praying, be professional and pay the fee.

[ebess]

The fee is unreasonable for a site of my size. It would cost me more money than I make.

I don't think it is fair of you to call me unprofessional.

[tennismaster]

Ebess,

Surely there is a middle course here.

You now know that you can produce great traffic and sales
from Inktomi. Consider your month in the index as a FREE
trial.

If it were my site I would check my logs in detail
and discover which pages produced the most
traffic/sales and them submit as many as I could
afford to Inktomi.
Then wait for Ink to spider the rest of my site for free,
or use some of the profits from the sales, to submit more
pages.

At least you know it is working, many of us submit pages
and have to keep changing them before we get any traffic!

Just my opinion of course!

TM

[glengara]

If I were you, I'd leave it for a while before paying.
Something seems to be going on, some of my pages have gone, others are still there.

[defanjos]

I agree with tennismaster, pay to include your "best" pages, then wait and see. If you can afford, do more, if not, you might be lucky and the whole site gets picked up for free.

I have noticed that if you pay for a few pages, the rest of the site eventually gets included for free. It is almost like Ink is saying, give us at least a bit of money and we will trow a bonus your way.

[mayor]

On one site with some paid inclusion pages, Ink finally decided to pick up the unpaid pages last Autumn for about a month, then dropped them, as if to say "wooopps, this is a monetized site ... shouldn't have done that". Those pages never returned to their serps, and they aren't worth paying for.

[ebess]

Thanks to everyone for your help.

I will leave it alone for a while and see if it gets picked up again. In the meantime, I will try to figure out which pages might be worth paying for...although it seems that if I pay for some it might actually lower my chances of having the rest of them picked up.

It is frustrating, b/c my sales are actually affiliate sales -- so I cannot tell which pages are producing b/c I don't even know what was actually purchased -- only that I had sales with a specific merchant. So it's hard for me to figure out which pages are most worth paying for to be indexed -- even if one got alot of traffic, that traffic may not have converted. I wonder if any other affiliates have any ideas on how to figure that stuff out..

btw, glengara - did any of your pages that were missing show up in the index yet?

Still keeping my fingers and toes crossed that the site gets picked up again... :)

[mayor]

About all you can do is figure out your average earnings per click-though and use that as a basis for assuming that all traffic from the same source is worth about the same amount.

You can take aim on ROI, but remember you're aiming a shotgun, not a rifle.