Was homepage Inktomi PFI a big mistake?

[Patrick Taylor]

I completed a new website a month ago. I submitted it to Google and paid-for-inclusioned (not through PositionTech - through ineedhits) the homepage on Inktomi. Several pages are now indexed in Google in the time-honoured way (nice traffic) and the homepage, sure enough, has appeared in Yahoo - because of the PFI. But did I make a big mistake with PFI? Does it mean that Yahoo won't do a normal spider on the homepage or any of my other pages, and that if I ever stop paying for inclusion, the homepage will be dropped?

This is basically a hobby site, and not worth paying up a small fortune for lots and lots of other pages to be PFI-ed.

[McMohan]

Politically correct answer is No. If during the PFI program slurp finds your site on free crawl then your site will continue to remain.

But in practice?... anyone with such experiences?

Best wishes

Mc

[Patrick Taylor]

My question is, does Inktomi PFI inhibit slurp?

[McMohan]

Make sure you read this thread, particularly Tim's post.

[webmasterworld.com ]

Best Wishes

McMohan

[caveman]

My question is, does Inktomi PFI inhibit slurp?

I don't think that it inhibits the bot ... rather, it inhibits your pages that are *not* PFI'd from showing up in the actual SERP's, if *some* of your pages *are* PFI'd. Nothing is absolute, but generally, yes it's an issue.

[Patrick Taylor]

Thanks for the replies. I read Tim's post again. If there are 2 independent databases, one containing Inktomi PFI-ed pages and the other one containing the free-crawled pages, that sounds okay, and the PFI-ed page will override the free-crawled page in SERPS... sounds fine too. But it also appears that a page might not be free-crawled at all for at least a year, which doesn't sound all that fine.

Plus there's supposedly a change coming in mid-April, when existing Inktomi PFI-ed pages won't any longer be in the Yahoo index.

Can anyone throw any light on this? Can an un-PFI-ed page stay uncrawled for at least a year, and will current PFI pages drop out of Yahoo soon?

[fuego]

Index Connect clients will continue to receive distribution in Yahoo. If you've paid to have specific pages included (as it appears you have), the plan is to drop those pages from Yahoo in mid April. Your best bet is to try and get a linking relationship with some folks who are not Index Connect or single page PFI clients. That would dramatically increase the likelihood of your site being crawled and included.

[Marcia]

It might not be a bad idea to get some links to internal pages on the site from pages in the non-paid database, especially if they're to index.htm pages of /directories/

[Patrick Taylor]

Thanks for the response, and I think I will take your advice. Yeap, I submitted only my new site's index page for PFI. I'm not sure why it would be so much harder to get into Yahoo's free-crawl index than Google's, but it smacks of money. The more I go along, the more I approve of Google's modus operandum, despite the various algo ups and downs.

... just read Marcia's post - thanks for that too. How would I know if an external page I want a link from is in the paid or non-paid database?

[outland88]

I've used Inktomi PFI for many years. No page that I didn't pay for was ever included freely for a specific domain. This seems to be the general consensus in quite a few forums. I did let a few domains lapse from PFI that were well linked but they haven't been picked up by Inktomi in over a year. Every other domain I had that was picked up freely by Inktomi was crawled pretty well.

The reason I use PFI is my sites are typically 35-100 pages. Inktomi was always notorious for dropping unpaid for pages only to have them resurface sometimes months later. If you don't have to worry about commerce then I wouldn't go the PFI route. If you have hundreds of pages with plenty of inbound links I wouldn't list either. But that's a moot observation because the crawler would have already picked you up and you wouldn't be asking or about the PFI route.

Basically once you use Inktomi PFI you can't seem to get a good divorce from it.

[Patrick Taylor]

I guess that answers it. Like a bad marriage - big mistake.