Inktomi is not handling 301's very well

[Marcia]

A site was moved with permanent redirection last July. It was listed for quite a while, and is now showing for the former URL, where it hasn't been for close to a year. Date on the current listing:

Last Mod: 2003/03/27

for the old URL. There haven't been any links to the old for ages, they're all to the new one, which also has a Yahoo listing - so it's kind of hard to lose. But Ink's managed to lose track of it, and it sure looks like inbound links figure into rankings from the looks of it.

[khuntley]

Marcia,

Have you considered Ink's "best of the web" index vs. paid index vs. everyone else? It may be, unfortunately, that Ink doesn't care whether or not the site was redirected.

It does appear that Ink is mainly about inbound links. I would consider increasing the inbounds as you may be able to push the site into the "best of the web" index if it was not there. In the past with Ink this seems to have taken about three months, one month of getting inbound links and a couple months of waiting.

You've been around and likely know that Ink also likes basic on-page optimization also. But it is links that push a site into the BOTW index.

Kevin

[Marcia]

Kevin, the site's optimized for Ink and has always had the rankings. Ink had the site at the old location and they've had it at the new since last year - ranking equally as well.

There are links to the new but aren't any to the old URL because it hasn't been there for a year. They've lost the site at the current location, have gone back to using the old URL which has been invalid all this time.

[mcavic]

Marcia, I'm having the same problem with ink. I have a site with some pages that are 301'd to other internal pages. Inktomi still has 21 of the 301'd pages listed. It has been removing them very gradually - it dropped one yesterday, and sometime before that, two others.

Just the other day I changed the 301's to 404's to see how fast Ink picks those up. I don't know why it would have dropped your new urls, though - both the old and new pages are ranking fine for me.

[kevinpate]

I wouldn't bank on Ink doing any better on the 404's.
Ink comes back month after month for pages X, Y, Z, each of which returns a 404 code each time.

These pages were non-existent even before I became involved with the site, and I came on board more than a year ago.

I think Inkbot was designed by a baptist ... once saved, always saved.

[TomWaits]

They've really made a mess of this update. We've got a site with multiple domain name pointers that Inktomi never had a big problem with before. Occasionally another domain name besides the intended one would slip in, I don't have any robot instructions for the domain names, never needed them, don't like to mess with things that aren't broken. However, I'm looking at some searches tonight, what an incredible mess. Some SERPS we own like 8 out of the top 10 positions, because in addition to the multiple domain names, they also pick up referrer code we've placed somewhere, so www.website.com?referrer=amazon and www.website.com?referrer=yahoo will each be listed one after another. I can't recall seeing that in Inky before. Besides the 301's, we've got a 911, because Yahoo cannot possibly be thinking of using this pathetic hunk of junk come year-end. The SERPS look like they've got some twelve-year-olds over there hitting the red buttons seeing what will happen when they do this.

[Marcia]

No more 301, and no 404. I put a "moved" page up at the old location with a link to the new one they had for a year and lost and resubmitted. They do have a page that was put up a couple month ago - that one's right, it never was anyplace else.