Last word on Y! and Inktomi PFI

is Y! still indexing them for free?

[walkman]

I ask because one site of mine was on Inktomi PFI (signed up to see if I was banned) and Slurp still shows to grab the index page. Also, that's the only page paid for. I thought it was supposed to stop that after 4/15?

[Warren]

No. Your subscription will be honoured until such time that it expiries. So SLURP will still continue to visit your site.

Your Inktomi subscription will not provide you with Yahoo! distribution. This stopped after April 15th 2004.

To continue receiving Yahoo! traffic, Overture Site Match is an option.

Warren

[Marcia]

If I'm not mistaken, if the pages were also in the index from regular crawls before they won't be removed from Yahoo, they just won't get the 48 hour spidering.

[walkman]

"Your subscription will be honoured until such time that it expiries. So SLURP will still continue to visit your site. "
what threw me off was Y! Slurp who did that. It makes sense that they have only one spider with different commands.

[your_store]

if the pages were also in the index from regular crawls before they won't be removed

Amazingly true. I had my entire site (10K) included in the index, 750 pages of which were PFI'd with Ink.

So there still is the hope of free traffic outside of Google.

[Warren]

"If I'm not mistaken, if the pages were also in the index from regular crawls before they won't be removed from Yahoo, they just won't get the 48 hour spidering."

That is true. URLs which are picked up by other means (i.e. Free Crawl) will obtain the full distribution.

[HarryM]

Warren,

I have one Inktomi page via ineedhits, my site is Yahoo! Slurped regularly, almost all my pages are in the Yahoo index, but cannot be found by a keyword search in the US or UK. (Although it can in Far East Yahoos) It's a .com site hosted in the UK.

As mine is a non-commercial site, Site Match is not an option, so today I emailed Ineedhits for advice on how to dump the Inktomi page and get back into the Yahoo serps.

Have you got any pointers on what to do? My Inktomi page doesn't expire until October. :(

[your_store]

You don't have to dump the Inktomi page to get it relisted in Yahoo. All of my 750 pages that are Ink PFI'd are now in Yahoo again. You need to get links from sites that are currently in the index.

[HarryM]

your_store,

Lucky you! But that's not my experience.

I only have one Inktomi PFI page which gives a trickle of traffic. The other approx 400 pages are in the Yahoo index, but give me no traffic. Yahoo! Slurp typically takes 200 or so pages a week.

It's quite clearly a ban of some kind - presumably regional because my pages can be found in HK, TW, SG, and Korean Yahoos, and I get traffic from them. I also very occasionally see hits in my log from search.yahoo.com, but I find it impossible to reproduce the search, which again makes me think it is some sort of regional ban. I know I am not penalized because Yahoo have already told me that, so I can only presume I am banned because of my Inktomi page.

Warren stated above:

Your Inktomi subscription will not provide you with Yahoo! distribution. ... To continue receiving Yahoo! traffic, Overture Site Match is an option.

I also get regular emails from Inktomi stating that "To continue receiving Yahoo! traffic you will need to upgrade to Overture Site Match." Which does not help my blood pressure.

The only conclusion I can come to is I am banned from Yahoo! free search in order to "entice" me into Site Match. So my question is how do I get out of this Catch 22 situation?

[4crests]

I have a few different Yahoo stores. Every page of each store is now in the Yahoo index. EXCEPT, the one site that I had listed with Inktomi through Ineedhits. The one I listed with Ineedhits has ONLY the INDEX page listed in Yahoo. I too keep getting emails asking me to sign up for SiteMatch. FRUSTRATING !

[your_store]

For what it's worth, all of my PFI pages were through Postiontech.

[Warren]

A couple of points - regardless of which PI partner you go through, it doesn't matter in terms of inclusion. Their is no preference given to one partner over another. This is the same for the previous Inktomi and now Overture Site Match.

You can remove your URL by "suspending" it in the account admin area. This will remove you from your current Inktomi distribution. You will then have to wait until you are free crawled.

Or you can wait until you are free crawled and leave it in. As has been pointed out, Links are the key.

Hope this helps.

[Warren]

PS Sticky mail me if you are still having issues.

Warren

[HarryM]

Warren,

** edited: sorry, I didn't see your note about stickying you until I had submitted this **

Thanks for the advice but it doesn't seem to help in my case. So I am still puzzled.

I get crawled regularly, and I also get traffic from searches in the Far East( but not the US or UK). I have recent pages in the Yahoo index. There are also pages that link to my site in the Yahoo index.

I still don't know if I have an Inktomi problem, or if am I caught up in some regional glitch. My site (in my profile) is a non-commercial .com hosted in the UK and includes both English and Chinese pages.

I would appreciate any help that you could give. I have raised this in several threads with no success, and at one time Tim was going to look into it but I never heard any more.

Some boring details follow.

Keyword searches

With keyword searches, I can only find my Inktomi PFI page in the US and UK Yahoos, but I can find ALL my pages in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and Korean Yahoos.

Logged searches

Last weeks stats show searches from:

- images.search.yahoo.com = 184
- search.yahoo.com/search = 11 (Based on Google searches I would have expected several hundred at least.)
- cn.websearch.yahoo.com/search/web_cn = 11
- au.search.yahoo.com/search/aunz_imgview = 11
- search.hk.yahoo.com/yc/hk = 5
- av.rds.yahoo.com/_ylt = 2
- cn.rd.yahoo.com/home/websearch = 1
- tw.search.yahoo.com/search/kimo = 1

But if I try to reproduce the searches from search.yahoo.com/search my page doesn't show. Presumably because as I am in the UK I am routed to a different database. But I can reproduce the searches from HK, TW, etc.

Pages in the Yahoo! index which link to my site

If I do a search for www.mydomain.com in the US Yahoo I get 6 valid entries which includes

- Google Directory
- okpages directory
- my Yahoo! profile
- 2 pages which link to me

But if I search for pages which I know link to my site I can find most of them. Of these many are cached and the cached pages include my link.

Pages in the Yahoo! index

site:www.domain.com gives my index page and my Inktomi PFI page. Both are cached. The cached version of my index page is the most recent version of 18 April.

site:http://www.domain.com gives 385 of my approx 400 pages, including the most recent pages added on 30 March. None are cached.

Crawls

Last week's log shows 53 pages (of about 400) were taken by "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)". The previous week it was 106. Before that it was typically 200 pages, but I haven't updated my site for a couple of weeks which presumably would explain the drop.

Other

I also never got the "free" Yahoo traffic that was advertised. Is this significant?

[Bobby]

I need a few opinions here.

I was quite happy with Inktomi's paid inclusion program as paying once makes things simple for my clients.
The idea of pay per click however is frightening (and potentially expensive).

What is the best way to get a site back into the Yahoo/Altavista index without having to go thru PPC?

And IF (and that's a big IF!) one day I decide to go the PPC route is it possible to set limits like what Look$mart was doing?

Basically I need to make proposals to clients that I can quantify and say "it will cost you X amount of $ to get listed.