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Good news:
I nailed the 7th spot of a popular keyword phrase I was targeting. It's looks like AV's PFI pays off for getting your site up to the top in a really short amount time.
Bad news:
The results displaying my site only appears who knows how many times out of how many searches. This really sucks that they still rotate their results. Why should I pay money to only have my site appear XX % of the time? Who knows what that percentage is. 10%...50%...90%??
On one of my AV PFI pages, I just noticed a message that an error occured when the spider visited the page. I found out today so this must have happened last week. Since there was a problem with retrieving my page, they have dropped it out of the index today with this new update.
I went to Infospider's page and clicked on the member support link. I was immediately taken to a chat room filled with a few support reps. Just as soon as I entered, I was asked if I needed some help. I explained my error and the support rep replied with a few reasons why something like that would happen.
Some of the reasons were:
Server Busy when spider retrieved the page.
Page is considered spam by AV's regs.
URL was incorrect.
The rep asked for my URL so that he could personally check my account. I didn't want to post it in the chat room for everyone to see, so I double-clicked on his user name to start a private chat.
I gave him my URL and he looked everything over. To his opinion, everything looked fine in terms of it not being spammy(I guess). Then he told me that he would send a mail off to Altavista to see what they have to say about it. When he receives a reply I'm supposed to have the information forwarded to my account address.
The most likely problem was that my server was busy when the spider visited my page.
Note: Only the PFI page was dropped from the DB, not the rest of the "free" pages within the same site.
Now I don't like how all this PFI plan is setup, but I have to say that is some really good customer service on Infospider's part. All of this took less than 5 minutes. It didn't get my page placed back into the DB but at least I had some help in dealing with my problem.
Now the bad part.
If your server busy at the wrong time, like when the PFI spider is sent out, then you will be dropped out of the index at the next update time. They only check once and that's what really sucks. You will then have to wait one more week, possibly two, to see if your page gets re-entered into the index. (Unless AV fixes the problems)
I'll post again when, IF, I hear back from AV's reply to Infospider.
Its been a month and 14 days since Ive had a new page crawled and indexed via the free submission route. We have gone through an intensive optimization cycle with a number of new feeder domains and are about to embark on the PFP cycle.
MS, thanks for the info - we are busy moving hosts and setting up new servers - may be a chance of downtime and I will hold off submitting these new domains until everything's stable.
My strategies always been quite simple with the pay for spidering engines.
Domains which were in the index and in good positions before the engines(Ink & A.V) changed their policies, I have left them alone.
End Result: They have maintained and in many cases improved their ranking.
New domains and projects, it seems that we have little choice but to go the pay for spidering route!
Has anyone else got a page into AV or Ink via free submission in the last month?
