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About six weeks ago I went through an Inktomi affiliate via the web and paid $39 to have my site indexed. Very poor decision. Apart from finding my Yahoo inclusion MIGHT only be relevant for three rather than 12 months because of Yahoo's upheaval, dozens of other websites are now listed via my URL on different engines taking the Inktomi feed. My visitor logs began showing the problem soon after my $39 was paid... sites such as the Ministry of Economics in Argentina are indexed with a URL that begins as the cgi-bin of my site and ends with the absolute URL of the requested site. Since sites such as the Argentina Ministry of Economics obviously don't magically reside in my cgi-bin, the searchers are presented with a default Error 404 page from my server. My logs are now cluttered with these failed clicks, mostly via MSN but also including one via Yahoo a couple of days ago. I'm assuming Inktomi is the core of the problem because all clues point in that direction.
The sites incorrectly indexed by the engines all have a link from one of the dozen or so regional directly pages I maintain, where the URLs are written with a preceding bit of code that takes the exiting path through a script in my cgi-bin (to record the destination of departing visitors). This is a common bit of code widely used and has never caused any problems for search engine robots. From what I can figure out, the Inktomi bot has been indexing the path rather than the final destination of URLs it's travelled to via my site.
With thousands of net surfers presumably being frustrated by error pages and with some pretty important websites losing visitors to my default error page, I thought the search engines might be interested in maintaining the quality of their service. Wrong. I've tried about a dozen times to contact the search engines via email. A human being did respond from MSN seeking more info, which I quickly sent back. There was then silence for several days till I sent another email (what's going on?) and got a form letter reply two days later saying the MSN engine is too big to manually fix anything and the engine will re-index at some time in the next four months. Great... months more inconvenience for everybody, bad marketing for their own search service, and the problem thereafter may get worse.
I've searched all over Yahoo to find an avenue of contact but no luck. I'm trying to help search engines fix a problem that harms them as much as it harms me, but I'm confronted by a Berlin Wall. Does anybody know where I can turn to at least have this problem acknowledged and maybe even rectified?
But this seems to be part of a widespread problem they have with redirects.
About six weeks ago I went through an Inktomi affiliate via the web and paid $39 to have my site indexed. Very poor decision. Apart from finding my Yahoo inclusion MIGHT only be relevant for three rather than 12 months because of Yahoo's upheaval, dozens of other websites are now listed via my URL on different engines taking the Inktomi feed
Paying for Inktomi NEVER got you into Yahoo (Yahoo was powered by Google) - paying for the old Inktomi will still get you what you paid and contracted for... ie inclusion in SE's powered by Inktomi. As a bonus, Yahoo have included for a short time, those that paid for Inktomi.
[mysite.com...]
Why? Because my tracking code resides in my cgi-bin and that's the path visitors travel when they leave my site to visit other sites I've got listed on my links pages, including the Argentina URLs. This is the coding I've had in place for a couple of years and it's never caused problems before (until I foolishly paid $39 to "formalise" my Inktomi-fed listings on Yahoo). I've sorted out a bit of a redirect from my cgi-bin but even the Google Adsense banners on the redirected pages are appearing now in Spanish with Argentina listings. This is almost certainly an Inktomi listing error but Inktomi, its owner and its clients don't seem to give a damn.
Cheers
This is a very widespread problem. Interestingly, it seems to be most prevalent with sites that PFI'd with Inktomi. I have no idea what glitch or bug causes this or what it is. There are widespread reports that if you PFI with Inktomi, your site may get banned because of dupe content on other sites (which is often just dynamic redirects from other engines, like in your case documented above).
The tricky thing is that when the false dupe pages show up in the serps intead of the real ones, it's impossible to tell if the dupe content triggered Ink to ban your page and show the bogus on in it's place... or if your page was banned for a different reason and the dupe content is just showing up now that yours is gone.
Yahoo has been tight lipped about the details about this problem, but steveb is correct, you really should email that address above. They will be able to take a look at that url.
Intersesting antecdote:
Months ago, I noticed this same phenomenon on my site. A site that was linking to mine showed up in the serps as if it were my site and my PFI homepage completely disappeared. I wrote a detailed explanation of how Inktomi was incorrectly indexing this guys site and that it was showing as duplicate content in Inktomi even though he was really just linking to several sites through a cgi couter so he could track visits. Instead of fixing the problem, Inktomi just banned that site completely. This guys site was totally clean and he got banned from Inktomi because I sent one email showing how Inktomi was incorrectly indexing his site. It was really kind of sad, and I still feel horrible about it.
I'm on a crusade to get my PFI pages back in, and once I do, I will start working on getting his back in. I feel responsible for getting him banned.
