All my pages dropped from Ink except PFI

What is the current Ink update cycle?

[Callanish]

Yesterday all my pages except for the pay for inclusion ones dropped out of the Ink index. (Hundreds of pages had been in the index for years.) This has had a devastating effect on my MSN traffic.

In the absence of any comment about recent changes to the Ink algorithm, I assume this has been caused by my site being unavailable when the spider came round before the last index build. The site has been down twice for periods of up to eight hours in the last month.

(Yes, I'm now looking for a new host.)

Does anyone know anything about the current Inktomi update cycle - how long will I wait for their next new index to come into use?

Thanks for any feedback.

[Callanish]

Well, it is surely unethical for PFI services to take your money for a year's inclusion then refuse to help when you break some secret rule and Inktomi bans or demotes you.

At the very least the payment should be proportionally refunded for the inclusion period lost.

[Robber]

Is it the case the your site has not changed since the original review when the PFI pages were accepted? That would sound a little harsh, although whats the betting their Ts and Cs provide for this?

[mayor]

Their T's and C's cover everything.

[textex]

I paid for three sites.
All legit and all got the boot.
One by one.

Thread is here: [webmasterworld.com...]

[mayor]

If you have your raw logs, grep for peyote.inktomi.com

If your site came up in a scan for certain keywords and got eyeballed by a human editor and the editor decided you were spamming for whatever reason, or the editor had a grudge for affiliate sites, or they were hung over and had a lot of sites to review, you could get the ax unfairly. All it takes is a few seconds and my logs indicate they ax your whole site after just looking at a single page.

As I've said, and fiestagirl indicated in that other thread, a visit by peyote.inktomi.com is the kiss of death.

If you want to play in Ink's sandbox, you should watch your raw logs religiously to better learn how they operate, and you should be ready to accept getting sites booted with or without good cause, and you should consider any PFI money to be at risk.

[willnot]

I had an Inktomi penalty placed on my website back at the beginning of June. ALL of my non-paid pages were excised and my PFI pages were at or very near the bottom of the results for any set of search terms of which I could think. This indicated to me that Inktomi had "marked" my pages and only those with penalties more grevious than mine would be lower on any given set of search terms.

I tried and tried to get something out of PositionTech about my pages but it was apparent from their answers that they had absolutely no idea why my website was penalized. I never acted on their suggestions - which would have required everything from re-writing hundreds of "similar" pages to some kind of ritual involving goat's blood.

Luckily for me I got a call from an Inktomi sales rep about 2 weeks into this. She was totally embarassed to have made a cold sales call to a fever-hot prospect and made some inquiries for me.

Seems my entire website had been penalized for 6 little "underscores" at the bottom of my home page, each of which had an embedded link to another website. I had already removed them after I got the penalty as part of my "site cleanup" but I would never have thought of them as penalty fodder.

Inktomi says they skew the results, said she. They have been there for years, said I. Well, they're gone now and Inktomi said that your penalty will be lifted for the PFI pages and your website spidered in the next cycle, she replied. It was.

[Robber]

Dont suppose you got her name and number did you?!?!?!

[TrumanTiger]

This may sound crazy, but I'll throw it out anyway ...

If you're having trouble and don't have a robots.txt file, get one up right away. I was having troubles recently with a couple of sites. One PT rep said that our custom 404 displaying when he tried to get robots.txt was the problem (we didn't have the robots.txt file on either site at the time). Our URL status even displayed "robots.txt" error for a time.

Again, it sounds crazy. And we did tweak a couple of other technical things at the same time. But after a few days we were back up and running.

[mayor]

That's why I say you have to watch your raw logs, Truman, so you can see if you're getting spidered and what the Ink spiders (that's right, plural) do, or don't do, at your site, and whether or not you get some Inktomi visitors you'd rather not have.

You can study your logs, or you can take up Voodoo, rain dances, goat's blod, etc.