BW Online | October 6, 2003 | Web Searches: The Fix Is In: "Just ask Rob Spooner. The 56-year-old runs a travel site called Online Highways with informational pages about various small towns throughout the U.S. Inktomi, a search engine that now belongs to Yahoo, contacted him late last year about becoming a paid-inclusion participant. The proposal: Spooner would pay 10 cents for every visitor Inktomi passed along. Spooner did the math, figured he would lose money on anything more than 3 cents a click, and declined the offer.
Then things went downhill. Spooner's Web pages soon plunged in Inktomi's search rankings and disappeared from key sites like MSN, where Inktomi feeds its listings. After he demanded to know what happened, Spooner learned from Inktomi that his site contained editorial flaws that hurt his ranking. And he would have to become a paid-inclusion customer to learn what these flaws were. All this, while his pages remained well ranked on Google. 'I lost a quarter of my traffic,' says Spooner."
posted by Jen @ 2:14 PM
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