Sitematch and similar paid submission

Could they be used for mischief?

[mikeD]

I have always wondered whether these paid submission system could be used by competitors to destroy your websites ranking. The reason being I once paid for a yearly crawl on Fast with 48 hr crawling. However when I didn't accept to pay for a following year my site was kicked out of Fast never to be seen again. I even paid again to get this site back in Fast with no luck. This was a pr7 site with over 1000 backlinks.

So say for example I have a site ranking well in Yahoo but it doesn't use sitematch but just the free submission. Couldn't a competitor pay to get my homepage in Yahoo with sitematch and then stop payments after a year. This could well lead to the site getting banned from Yahoo.

Tell me if I am way off left field here, but isn't this possible?

I know representatives of the search engines will say no chance. But I know plenty of other webmasters who have used paid inclusion, stopped after 1 or 2 years and never got back in that search engines results.

[DaveN]

Anything is possible, but I bet Y! learnt from the Inktomi problem, where if you had a site in the Free index say a 1000 pages and you wanted to get the site spider every 48hrs you paid for homepage inclusion, then pulled your hair out after 999 pages disappeared leaving only the PFI index page.

and yes competitors did do it to each other all the time... well in one of my industries anyway, they even signed GB’s with other peoples URL’s and 301 banned sites on each other….alls fair in love and war ;)

I’m sure Tim posted something about this when sitematch was first launched!

DaveN

[Warren]

DaveN

I am shocked at such tactics. Who would do such a thing! ;-)

With Overture Site Match, things are slightly different.

If you are in the index and wish to take advantage of the 48 hour refresh (for example), so you sign up for OSM.

After a set period of time, you no longer wish to participate (for whatever reason), your site will return to the status it had prior to participating in OSM.

However, your ranking pre and post OSM may not be the same, if the index has gone through an update (pages added or removed) or an algo change.

Cheers

Warren

[mikeD]

seems the pay for crawl system is basically flawed

[Symbios]

Pay per crawl is ok, its the Pay Per Click that I have a problem with.