Forum Moderators: open
1. Does any one here have any suggestions or what I could do?
2. Is there a way to tell a search engine which page is your index page (besides naming the page index.htm?
[edited by: heini at 8:55 am (utc) on Sep. 12, 2003]
[edit reason] Please see sticky mail / thanks! [/edit]
check it out:
[webmasterworld.com...]
Inktomi is now constantly purging sites (free inclusion) and demoting sites (paid inclusion). Very few people ever get their traffic back.
I lost a 500 page site (and two years work) a few weeks ago.
Lessons:
1. Don't ever pay Inktomi a lot of money for paid inclusion. If you get demoted there is nothing you can do to recover, since you will never know the reason. And they keep your money.
2. Don't put all your effort into one large site. Several smaller ones will spread the risk.
Reason #1....they own it.
Reason #2....Ink results are actually very good for "important" sites...they are not so good for sites with very few incoming/backlinks.
Ink delivers very good results for most search terms, occasionally it screws up on less popular phrases.....but so does Google, infact Google to a much greater extent!
Yahoo....roll those Ink results....they are good for 99.5% of folks, and that is about as good as it gets!
Where in the world did you get that number from?
I am involved in some of the most competetive indistries and my INK results are junk!
Doorways, redirects and expired domains in top 20 of SERPS.
Inktomi is now constantly purging sites (free inclusion) and demoting sites (paid inclusion).
Wait a sec, that doesn't make sense.
I think some people have to take a step back and view this objectively. The Ink serps are not pages upon pages full of spam. They are very relevant results.
Just because your pages don't rank well in Ink does not indicate there is something wrong with Ink, just like if you jump into a swimming pool and sink, it doesn't necessarily mean there's something wrong with the swimming pool.
No offense, but viewed objectively it is far more likely that there is something deficient about the way your site is laid out.
All of my work is squeaky clean. I don't spam in any way.
I am not whining that INK is full of spam and is irrelevant for SERPs. However, as mentioned, I am involved in some very competetive industries and I am seeing a doorway page, two redirects/cloaked pages, and one expired domain in top 20 results. Yeah, the other 17 results are pretty good. Just making a point.
The point of this thread however is pages and sites dropping off the index.
Google also drops sites and pages, and not always for easily understandable reasons. Remember the large debates about vanishing index pages?
In Google's case inevitably technical reasons, glitches, are made out as culprits.
With Inktomi, people will always suspect it has to do with paid listings.
If a simple PFI listing drops, it's in favour of XML feeded listings. If a free lsiting drops, it's in favour of a PFI listing.
Hey, Ink probably has glitches too... :)
PT president Jim Stov claims that it isn't a ban or demotion of any kind, but he is wrong. I know that they are wrong for several reasons (including the fact that a PT employee let it leak to me that there was some kind of demotion and that there are multiple merchants calling with the same concern each day).
I want to get several webmasters / owners on the phone at the same time so we can leverage our collective concerns and get Jim Stov (President) to get somebody at Inktomi to get us an answer. I have organized this type of effort before and it worked well with other companies (Including Yahoo... yes, even Yahoo). If you are interested in getting in on the call, please sticky me.
There must already be hundreds of webmasters who have now been burned by this rampant demotion, who were formerly willing to pay a lot of money for inclusion.
When it becomes generally known that Inktomi can make an arbitrary decision to demote your paid pages and will NOT TELL YOU WHY then PFI is too much of a risk for medium or large sites.
At least we can build new sites and hope Google likes them. The PFI companies can only watch their whole business model disintegrate.
Most of the time, I find Inktomi is pretty good, and I have been using their PFI for almost two years with great success.
This week, though, I have had hundreds of pages across several domains totally demoted in MSN.com and in Hotbot. Very frustrating. My sites are clean, no spam. This happened before, but only for a couple of days, and now it has been over a week and I am starting to get concerned.
Here's an example of less than stellar results.
Search for: toronto locksmiths is MSN.com
One guy has 14 out of the 15 results. This one is particularly obvious because his phone number is in the title of most of his pages. The others are just pages of links, which largely consist of links to the same site.
I think Ink depends too much on human editorial review/booting of spam sites and can't keep up with it. Boot one big spam site today and it comes back in the form of ten little spam sites. Call it cyber-mitosis.
Does anyone know of webmasters that have contacted the search engines?
Yes, me. Ink emailed me back because they couldn't see the spam I referenced,
...position #2 is a subdomain hallway page (spamdomain2.com), it has hidden links to dozens of pages of links, it has a disclaimer that says, oops you've reached our test server please follow this link to our real website..."
Blatant stuff.
I gave them an "A" for diligence, "A" for effort, and an "F" for their ability to wipe out this particular form of spam.
I just checked and it currently still exists eight months after I reported it, (duplicate pages of minimalist content on subdomains: spamdomain2.com/widget1.htm and spamdomain3/widget1.htm).
Now mind you, this isn't a competitor, I just reported it to see if they would actually do anything about it. Generally the Ink database is pretty clean, but they can't seem to get their algo around this subdomain spammer.
No wait a min. advertizing money speaks louder then the webmasters. LOL
