Teoma paid inclusion woes.

My paid inclusion URL's are not showing up at all...

[patrick]

We currently have 12 URL's in the Ask/Teoma paid inclusion program (via INeedHits) which have been active for about five months. We have never had very good performance from Teoma, and there is a pretty good reason why -- our paid inclusion results don't show up at all in the results. We usually are atleast top 10 for our keywords on all the major engines (more times than not top 5), and Ask has never really been an exception in the past.

When I perform a search for my keywords, usually around #15-#20 will be a free inclusion listing for our site (old domain, old description), and paid inclusion is nowhere to be found. The whole point of paid inclusion is to have updated title/description for our listing, but it seems to be only showing the free slow/no updates version and just ignoring the paid one. I have no idea where to even begin, all I can think of is either a) we are being penalized or b) ineedhits has our inclusion goofed up (but I don't think this is the case, when I search for the exact title of the page, the paid listing will be ther result). Anyone have any clue as to where to start? I am going to try to e-mail INeedHits today and see if they can help, never had to deal with them before so I am not sure weather I should expect help or not. Any suggestions?

[JeevesGuy]

Patrick

Without knowing your urls it is hard to diagnose this accurately but you have given a few good clues. You indicate that a search for your title brings up the submitted pages. This confirms that your pages have indeed been indexed. You also mention that you have changed your domain, and that searches for relevant keywords turn up your old site but not your new one. If your old site is still accessible to our spider we will continue to index it. If you would like us to discontinue spidering your old site there are means available to you to accomplish this end. If your old sites have better link popularity than your new sites, your new sites will be handicapped in competing for placement.

I can assure you that there is neither a boost (obviously!) nor a penalty for submitted sites. If your unpaid sites have moved in ranking it is likely a result of changes in our algorithm, changes in your page, and / or a consequence of the growth in our index.

We appreciate your business and want you to feel comfortable with your purchase. Please do not hesitate to write to INeedHits if you are looking for additional information. Most issues make it back to us if INH cannot resolve them.

Thanks

JeevesGuy

[patrick]

Thanks alot for the info JeevesGuy. To clarify one point, when I say old domain / new domain -- all the domain names we have are active and point to the same page; the person that handled the marketing for this site before me submitted a goo 10+ of the sites URL's to search engines, which I am sure did not help the cause any ;) Anyhoo, when I say new, it is just the single domain name I chose to focus on from this point forward, but any of the alternative domains getting a good ranking is completely acceptable. I will shoot INeedHits an e-mail, perhaps I can get them to change the URL's to the non-handicapped domain name that is showing up in the results.

Thanks alot for taking the time to help out, I appreciate it.

Patrick