Are your paid INK pages in the Toilet?

Did they rank then get trashed

[stcrim]

Just looking for an accounting of what's happening with pay for inclusion.

Time and Time again we are hearing about paid pages that were doing fine in INK and now are in the toilet.

Anyone having that same experience with paid pages dropping in rankings?

-s-

[tigger]

I'm going to be doing some digging around next week as my traffic from MSN has dropped off, so something has gone a mis

[pmac]

My INK pages are ranking decent, but like tigger, my MSN traffic is way off.

[chiyo]

Our experience is that when you stop paying, traffic drops off from Ink engines for a month or so then slowly recovers. We made the mistake of paying for pages that were already in and lived to regret it. We just really wanted them to be spidered more often as they were updated every day or so. Of course when we stopped paying they were dropped despite being in on their own terms before.

probably best to use for new pages that you want to rank quickly only and not worrying about renewing even if they are only needed short term.

[stcrim]

MSN? Anyone seeing the possiblitiy that go-verture is pushing the already poor ranking INK stuff deeper into the MSN toilet?

-s-

[makemetop]

I've had 2 sites that have had this happen (whole sites penalized), and a few pages where the page has suffered a penalty.

Without going into precise details, it appeared 2 sites were (maybe)reported by a competitor and were (absolutely) inspected by a human (in logs). They would have previously been acceptable under the (somewhat lax) Inktomi guidelines - but didn't pass this time. Put up 2 new sites which should pass a human inspection muster and all terms are riding high again.

I had to completely scrap the original 2 sites though, changing pages to match the rules didn't lift the penalty - though no doubt I could have gone through the whole thing of e-mailing Ink., etc. It was quicker to pull the sites from Ink and submit new ones.

On the pages, an enterprising client took it upon themselves to add some really obvious spam to a few of their pages in the last week or 10 days. An auto-penalty zapped them within a matter of days - before I had even noticed what had happened.

So, it appears that there are some more stringent auto-penalties and some aggresive follow-up on reporting to catch the more obvious doorways, js redirects etc., etc.

My frank feeling is it has something to do with the experiment which are going on at MSN with their site preview [help.msn.com] which will instantly show up all spammy doorways, could reveal cloaking and expose multiple SERP stuffing.

If you can get to see it it could be a Google beater - but they do need to clean up their index for it to be really effective. (IMHO).

The MSN preview may also have something to do with Overture being tougher on having words going to pages that have something to do with the term and not liking pure affiliate link sites. If this all happens at MSN (and elsewhere) no-one is going to click on their sponsored listings as the surfer can see the site before going to it - if it doesn't look 'good' they won't click on it - no matter how much is bid :)

Different ball-game is about to start - and forewarned is fore-armed ;)

[toolman]

What I really think is happening is that they are targeting profitable keyword phrases (that webmasters are making money from) and manipulating the serps to produce a new market for themselves. I would bet money on it.

From what I've seen it's not really the domain thats penalized...it's the keywords.

[john316]

MSN is running some type of JS that over-rides scrolling until the page is completely loaded.

If you scroll down while the page is loading, which a lot of searchers do to catch the serps, the page automatically pops back up to the top target (sponsored sites) on full load.

It is subtle manipulation, but it is manipulation, it forces your window and your eye back to the paid advertisements.

Icky MS logic at work...slimeball stuff.

[stcrim]

>>>targeting profitable keyword phrases (that webmasters are making money from)

Imagine the amount of money INK would make if they signed up for every affiliate program on the internet and then put their affilate page on top for the given keywords...

-s-

[toolman]

>>>>Imagine the amount of money INK would make if they signed up for every affiliate program on the internet and then put their affilate page on top for the given keywords...

Imagine how much they would make if they frustrated you into submission (pun intended) to start paying in their PPC program just to be included in the top 100.

john316- I noticed that js thing a while back....it's a control freak thing - what else do you expect from M$? EXTREMELY IRRITATING.

[mayor]

I've seen a traffic drop starting Friday, which I also think is from one or all of the Ink partners.

John316, do you know when they added top-of-the-page reset?

[startup]

New site submitted to postiontech 25/02/2002. As of today it is not listed. The target is a high traffic 3 keyword phrase on AOL.

The whole reason for the submission was aimed at the current #1 listing. It has no links that I can find, not listed in Google and no major directory listing.

My site is tailored to the phrase and it has links on pages listed in Ink. This should be a easy target, let's see what happens.

[agerhart]

I know of someone who paid for a page to be in INK, and within a week the page was in the index, and in the top 10.

[Jill]

Our MSN traffic is dropping radically too. I wondered what was going on.

>Imagine the amount of money INK would make if they signed up for every affiliate program on the internet and then put their affilate page on top for the given keywords... <

Steve, don't give them any ideas. ;)

[john316]

>>John316, do you know when they added top-of-the-page reset?<<

Not exactly, but I believe it has been going on longer than the time frame you are looking at.

I also heard that INK is cracking down on cloaking, and have seen some different IP's for the PFI spider in my logs (since last friday).

[mayor]

Not cloaking here so that's not my problem.

Maybe I'm just looking at a slow weekend. We'll soon see.

[pageoneresults]

I think their new rules and guidelines might be having an effect on some. I submitted two pages for testing a few weeks back. They now hold positions within results 5 thru 15 in MSN. In pure Ink, at 2 thru 8.

[inktomi.com...]

[makemetop]

I am amazed that no-one seems to be commenting on the fact that MSN now has a copy of YOUR home page (at least) unless you have either used their new meta tag (per page) or robots.txt (per site) for exclusion and is now displaying it in their SERPs (to certain surfers) regardless of if it is an Ink listing, L$ or Overture. Am I the only person to see this? Surely (as I suggested earlier) this is a prime reason for Ink/Overture to try to bring back relevance and better 'quality' sites - people are going to see the title and description as only a secondary reason to click on a result - the image of the page is going to be their first impression of if a site is relevant/worth visiting - or am I missing something?

[Terrier]

Message:
Toolman - This is the case with us - just one keyword penalised others ok The keyword we have been penalised with is our main and high traffic keyword.
I think the idea that makemetop suggests to just scrap the site in ink build a new one and go with that is the right approach. What is intersting is for my main keyword in the top 10 one site appears twice under different urls and there are several sites with redirects.
Makemetop how do you pull the sites from ink with out affecting it in other SE's
With regard to the msn question site preview,this is valuable information!!Thank you.

[makemetop]

>how do you pull the sites from ink with out affecting it in other SE's

Suspend (or swap if you can) the URL in your paid inclusion control panel and add Slurp to your disallow list in robots.txt.

[Terrier]

Thanks appreciate the info, I do not belive you are able to swap the urls any more, will need to pay again ! Glad to able to say I have a url waiting in the wings for just such a job.

[mr_dredd2]

makemetop - sorry i am way behind, what is this site preview thing? and how can i use it on my browser?

this is a bit alarming!!

thanks v much.

[Terrier]

It is very difficult to know what is going on with ink. and how much time to spend working on it. I do think it is worth trying makemetops idea,new url and get the plastic out again. Interesting but painful see if it is a repeat performance good listing and then get the boot! What I do not understand is the spam sites (Referal)also sites with duplicate content (blatant dups) in the results seem to do well. I am top for my term in google yet no where to be found in ink and top for another keyword in both google and ink so it canot be the difference in alogo.

[makemetop]

>what is this site preview thing?

If you can't see it (and I've come to believe this is some sort of strange thing that no-one else can see - apart from me for some bizarre reason) - then sticky mail me with a search term and I'll e-mail you back the SERP I see.

You can tell I'm not spoofing - the images will come from MSNs' DB of pages that they have.

[rcjordan]

>apart from me for some bizarre reason

I think toolman and msgraph have been able to invoke it.

[makemetop]

Thank goodness - I'm not going loopy (or not too loopy anyway) :)

[Personalniche]

Is there a way to find out if your url is ban or penalized, or just a plain bad page.

Thanks

[minnapple]

The moderate optimizer (under achiever) seems to skirt many of bangs and bashes that some of the SE's can deliver.

Being on the outer fringe can be dangerous (but exciting) yet when the circle is pulled in you can be left dangerously on outside.

IMHO finding that area where you can put your head up for at least a couple of months without getting you head blown off, is not such a bad idea.

[mayor]

My site traffic suddenly dropped about 10% on March 1 (Friday) compared to the same day of recent weeks. As of Monday it has not recovered.

The best I can tell the drop came in Ink partners, paid and unpaid both.

[nell]

Perhaps one reason for the drop in MSN traffic is that many people who, in the past, used MSN (before they started putting too much starch in their shorts) have switched to Google to find what they want.
Their "auto scroll to the top" feature is no more than a full size version of a popup window shoving paid advertising in your face. They have alienated many people with their mercenary tactics including the SEO community that puts a lot of bread on their table.

I often wonder if there was a "grand plan" to all this including the price hike to $25 a page. A lot of people bought a lot of $12 pages before that increase only to find that just a month later the whole game had changed. I was one of them. If I knew then what I know now I wouldn't have been suckered in.

(edited by: nell at 3:23 pm (utc) on Mar. 5, 2002)