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I think this is another red herring....
Janet
My advice is to assume they (the missing pages) are lost and gone forever. Build a new site for Ink. If they come back, all the better.
As Alan Ginsberg said to me at a book signing many years ago: Ahhh...
I don't understand why, but recently got a huge downshift in Inkie only.
Thanks, I'm a decent amateur, but maintain only my own professional services site. Literally abandoning my code and redoing an entire new site would be unimaginable with 40 pages of really good "#1 on Google type" content.
The critical question is why do the sites still rank well at the pure Ink search provided by PT but not at the partner sites?
Could it be that PT have an outdated index?
Could it be that the feed to partner sites was screwed up in some way?
Having looked at a whole range of our listings, here's what I've found :
1. Since October 1st, almost all our sites have experienced a huge drop in Inktomi-related click-thrus.
2. Any of our sites built BEFORE May remain unaffected - MSN click-thrus still the same, same pages found on MSN, Hotbot SERPs, etc.
3. Any sites/pages built AFTER May have vanished from MSN.com and Hotbot.com, but are still in MSN.co.uk (+ Pure Inktomi)
4. This effect is NOT exclusive to PFI pages. We launched a site in June, done NO paid inclusion, and within a few weeks all pages were listed well in Inktomi (prominent in MSN.com, .co.uk, Hotbot SERPS). But Since October 1st, the site is NOWHERE in all these places.
This says to me this is an Inktomi issue, nothing to do with MSN (although I don't understand why MSN.co.uk appears to have escaped the knife). It looks like an algo change or a temporary experimenting with the SERPs.
My questions are -
Is this temporary?
If so, when will it settle down?
What's the reasoning behind the May cut-off?
Like most, I'm praying this is VERY temporary. It's looking very bad right now and my clients are going to be well cheesed off when they find out :-(
It hasn't - it is just that the regional filter has considered you a UK site and the MSN US site has considered you not to be US.
I have also been told that regional relevancy was turned up on US, UK and other English language INK portals at the beginning of the month but some sites targeting the US market (.coms) have not been identified (mistakenly) as US sites and have dropped down the listings. An urgent review is apparently underway to ensure these sites are correctly ranked. Some sites (including a couple of mine) have disappeared into limbo - being .coms and neither deemed US nor UK - so rank in the top 5 on pure INK but in the hundreds on both MSN US and UK!
A request has been put in to Inktomi to identify what criteria are necessary to ensure that a site appears in the correct regional portal results.
But as I thought, this appears to be a geo-targetting glitch that has gone a little awry in the US.
This is an attempt to ensure that primarily US results appear for US searchers and UK results for UK searchers. Their opinion (probably) was that US surfers don't want to see a load of foreign sites when looking for stuff and other countries were tired of getting US results.
I'm not sure that this is the best way to do it (well, right now it isn't - 'cos it doesn't work properly) - but I understand the motives.
Since MSM will continue to gain SERP marketshare, I am now force to setup web hosting in the USA, since 90% of our buisness is to the usa.
Has anybody done this yet, or have any other solutions. Can our ISP do anything to block geotargeting or profiling attempts by Ink or MSN
Also, I just got a response from PositionTech. I know I can't post their response, so I'll just summarize and reword. (if anyone wants to read it, just sticky me)
They said that my url has been affected by a recent algorithm changes in Inktomi and they're very sorry. They also said it's possible that my previous rankings may return some time in the future.
So what's your take on this? Is this mysterious new algorithm change supposed to be this geo targeting your talking about? I'm glad they admitted something is going one, but they aren't very specific and they aren't offering any solutions. Also, I did ask them about specifically about MSN and HotBot, and there was no mention of them in their response.
I take care of a medical site helping people all over the world, written in English, but located in Germany.
Nobody can make me believe and accept that this site with expert know-how for patients, still ranking well in PureSearch (and as well in MSN and HOTBOT b e f o r e Oct 1) has lost its credibility and usefulness for US readers with one blow!
And there are many site-owners sharing my experience.
By the way: I still assume that the main reason for all of this is known and still kept secret by ...Yahoo
MSN renews w/Ink
Yahoo buys Ink
MSNbot starts crawling the web and presumably will introduce their own SE.
MSN ends relationship w/LookSmart
So MSN has cut ties with one provider of their search results, another provider is bought by their competition, and they are clearly developing their own SE. So really, MSN has nothing to with this. How would they benefit from a "recent modification to Inktomi's algorithm"?
But let's see, is there a way for Yahoo to benefit from this? What do you think? Are they just using MSN now as a way to test their newly purchased technology? Can they do this? Would they do this?
I'm just sort of rambling here, because I'd like to get to the bottom of this.
Two weeks ago after using PT for PFI to Inktomi, I did a test page for a new site and it ranked at #1 and #2 for target keywords. I then brought it down to develop and complete and brought it back on with the completed site, and this week I am lucky to have it on the first page, but often into the 30's and 40's for results (all in two week time). I was also curious why my Pure Search results showed my site in the number one position for targeted keywords at the same time.
Having read this thread, I only have to assume that things are in a flux, and I need to just wait and see what will come about.
Ah...it's never boring around here.
Really enjoyed reading the article by makemetop:
[searchengineblog.com...]
Thanks all! Lindavh
I have had sites in PFI for about a year and a half and they have all been affected. They are all on .com domains but are hosted in Canada. They are doing poorly on MSN.ca, but they do at least show up.
I have sites on .com domains hosted in the US, with no possible affiliation to anything Canadian, and they have all lost their listings too. These sites were submitted after May.
ALL listings that were spidered without PFI are gone, old and new, Canadian and American.
My conclusion is that there are several things going on at the same time and we are all right.
P-tech has been extremely vague with their answers, saying that yes, there was an algo change on Oct 1, give it about a week and the bugs should be ironed out... and then today, i spoke with someone again and they said to give it a week and things should stabilize...
We will see what happens...
They should just retitle this thread to "The Runaway Thread". I give it a week before it gets completely out of hand.
-p
Well, I tried the PT pure search and found that it has also changed. One week ago my site was #11 for the keyword I wanted it and now it is #60 on pure search. It is now where to be found on MSN nor HotBot. Talk about a nose dive :)
Well, submitting a new site to Inktomi didn’t work either. Site just doesn’t show up quickly like before. The new site is buried down under.
Anyone has any updates on what is going on?
-epsrx
I figured I would stop lurking and come out to interact here. I am in the same boat with many of you. I did my PFI in July through Position Tech and had first page rankings on MSN with the optimized pages I included in my PFI. I disappeared around the first week of October. I have tried re-doing my SEO, changed the URL, and I have had no luck.
My biggest fear is that I am in violation of some Inktomi policy and they didn't notify me. Overall though I think something is broken and we just have to wait it out. I check this thread roughly three times a hour for new info.
I am really disappointed someone from Ink doesn't publicly set the record straight on this. Did I just throw my money out the window forever or is there an ETA for a fix?
Very frustrating times!
did Ink. change their algorithm
Yes they did!
One more thing, 1Smiley. When you reply to a thread, you have an option to get e-mail notifications when anyone else replies to it. That way you won't have to check all the time:)
I figured I would stop lurking and come out to interact here. I am in the same boat with many of you. I did my PFI in July through Position Tech and had first page rankings on MSN with the optimized pages I included in my PFI. I disappeared around the first week of October. I have tried re-doing my SEO, changed the URL, and I have had no luck.
Now I'm guessing you either stuffed the keywords section with keywords that were not visible on the landing page, or whoever generated your XML document did something illegit/shady.
-panic
I am really disappointed someone from Ink doesn't publicly set the record straight on this.
When dealing with Ptech (Position Tech or PositionTech), you'll NEVER get any information straight from Inktomi.
-panic
I cannot do anything for now but to wait and see what happens.
Cheers,
epsrx
Lets see...
Hope you all here have your rankings restored too.
The PFI firms seemed to be utterly useless in getting info about the problem. I expected more as they should have had a direct line of communicaton with the "techies in control" over at Ink.
All in all, a good learning experience.
