Spam at Inktomi

[robspooner]

I think it's amusing that anyone would suggest that Inktomi regards spam as a problem that "will be taken seriously." Spam is their business model, when they get paid for it. Then they call it Index Connect.

As a simple example, consider the result that you get from Inktomi when you enter "Cheap European Hotels" as your search term at MSN. The top response is "Orbitz Hotels - Cheap European Hotels." Unfortunately, if you read the description, you see that whoever produced the XML feed neglected to match the description of the "page" with the title of the "page." The description concerns Zion National Park.

However, there isn't any page. Not only is there no static page, there is no dynamic page responding to "Cheap European Hotels" as a URL variable. You are led to the main Orbitz page for hotels. There is absolutely no mention of Europe. The bargain hotels shown are all American. So much for "expedited editorial review."

Yet this page outranks a page that is entirely devoted to cheap European hotels. The Orbitz ranking can't be based on their content, which doesn't exist, or even their fake XML description, which is mismatched. It can only come from the keywords in the XML feed.

If anyone needs evidence that Index Connect is nothing but an open-door policy towards spam from anyone willing to pay, they needn't look any further.

[Kal]

Interesting find Rob, thanks for sharing. Perhaps Yahoo will do something about the quality of the Inktomi index when they finalize their purchase? Or perhaps not.

Meanwhile, we're having a fascinating discussion about cloaking and Trusted Feed in this thread (http://www.ihelpyouservices.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=6798) :)

[Advisor]

That's why Google has nothing to fear from any other search engine, at the moment. The others all allow "trusted feed." aka sanctioned crap!

Jill

[ihelpyou]

Welcome to the forums robspooner! :hi:

Great find Rob! As we suspected and even knew. Boy wouldn't the FTC love to look into the trusted feed shet?

[glengara]

Anybody know if all XML fed pages have the redirect-west designation?

[robspooner]

The FTC is aware of this in general, since I've sent them a detailed letter. According to Danny Sullivan, Inktomi claims that only 10 million "pages" in their index are from Index Connect. However, elsewhere they have claimed more than 1000 customers for the service, and just two of them (Wal-Mart and Amazon) account for 3.4 million, so this seems low. A hundred million more likely.

While illegitimate inclusion is a problem, the question of keywords is just as important. If you can specify that "Book Title X" is a keyword on your page, when in fact it is simply an order entry page with "Book Title X" mentioned only once, you will gain a huge advantage over non-paying people who are, for instance, actually discussing the book. On a page that actually exists.

I would like to think that Yahoo! will clean this up, but since they bought Inktomi on the premise that they were close to break even, and the revenue from Index Connect is entirely dependent on advertisers gaining an advantage that nobody wants to acknowledge, I am not holding my breath.

[ihelpyou]

The FTC is aware of this in general, since I've sent them a detailed letter.
I would love to see this letter Rob. Can you post it?

And no, Yahoo would not have any desire to 'clean' up this Inktomi stuff if it's making money for them. Quite a shame that we have to have corruption in this business.

It's no damn wonder Google is the most popular.

[robspooner]

As requested, here is the letter. Regarding my count of Amazon.com pages, either I'm not using a consistent research technique, or the number is changing. I don't know any way to simply ask Inktomi for the number of Index Connect pages by domain. I'm now guessing Amazon.com has around 3 MM, but today's result and previous results vary significantly. It's definitely a BIG number.

As the letter shows, I have a personal interest. There are many injustices in the world and I wouldn't devote time to this one except that Inktomi would like to put me out of business.

-----

December 23, 2002

Heather Hippsley
Assistant Director
Division of Advertising Practices
Federal Trade Commission
600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington DC 20580

Dear Ms Hippsley:

On June 27, the FTC sent a letter to the major search engine companies, advising them of your review of a complaint by Commercial Alert. Your letter admonished the search engines to carefully inform users whenever there were financial factors that affected results.

Inktomi Corporation provides a substantial portion of the search results that appear at MSN and Hotbot, among others. Inktomi has a program called Index Connect which allows large users to distort results in return for the payment of money. Neither MSN nor Hotbot adequately disclose this fact.

The putative purpose of Index Connect is to provide operators of large Web sites with certain services, of which the most important is guaranteed consideration for inclusion in Inktomi's index. Inktomi asserts that this is not the same thing as paying for ranking, but this is disingenous. Ranking is based on the presence of keywords and these can be proliferated by anyone intent on gaining an advantage. All search engines have editorial policies which are intended to control this practice.

Inktomi publishes its list of editorial standards at http://www.inktomi.com/products/web_search/guidelines.html. Their claim is that Index Connect merely expedites editorial review. In fact, it can be amply demonstrated that the editorial review is discarded for URLs submitted by paying Index Connect customers.

I will use Wal-Mart and Orbitz as examples. There are many others, but these are particularly egregious. There are over 675,000 URLs for Wal-Mart in Inktomi's index and 169,000 for Orbitz. Since Amazon has more than 3.7 million, these are not the highest counts but they certainly qualify as large numbers.

Almost all Wal-Mart pages direct the visitor to a page preloaded for the purchase of a single item. Reviewing Inktomi's list of desirable features, Wal-Mart misses two of five. They are not original or unique, and they do not have links to related content, except other items for purchase at Wal-Mart. On the list of unwanted features, Wal-Mart is guilty of generating pages with substantially the same content as other pages, in great quantity, automatically. Nevertheless, Inktomi has approved two thirds of a million of them.

The Orbitz pages come in more varieties, but there is a subset that is particularly instructive. Almost 1300 pages are returned on a search for "flight search." The titles differ only in the destinations (e.g. "Orbitz - Flight to Belmont" versus "Orbitz - Flight to Tema") and the pages which they lead to are identical. In other words, after passing through a page that counts the hits, all clicks are redirected to the same spot with the content (Belmont or Tema in the examples above) removed.
These pages violate all the rules that Wal-Mart's do. In addition, these "pages" are dedicated to directing the user to another page, and are built primarily for search engines. Actually, it is hard to describe the degree to which these pages fail the normal, published editorial tests because they don't even exist.

In contrast with Inktomi's welcoming attitude towards spam by paying customers, their attitude towards our site Online Highways (www.ohwy.com) has been hostile. To some degree, quality is subjective, but most people would agree that we meet Inktomi's published guidelines. However, in August, we were assigned a penalty by Inktomi's editors, which had the effect of ending our exposure through MSN and Hotbot. At almost the same moment, we were contacted by a sales person from Inktomi, who suggested that although she didn't know why the problem had come about, we could solve it by paying money to join Index Connect.

After much pressure and some correspondence with your office, Inktomi announced that it was merely a coincidence and that we were not being blacklisted to induce us to buy their product. They in fact gave us an analysis of our supposed shortcomings, which seemed somewhat strained but gave me a short list of changes. After I made these, it was announced that we had met their standards and we were restored.

Earlier this month, the penalty was reimposed and again we have lost MSN and Hotbot. Again I'm told that the problem can be solved if we join Index Connect and that I cannot ask anyone in editorial what the problem is otherwise. Pricing for Index Connect is negotiable, but Inktomi has refused to consider any rate which is not more than my gross revenue from the traffic. No proposal has ever been made to us that did not involve our paying more than all the money we receive. Furthermore, although I've offered to pay $200/hour to talk to someone and find out what the issue is, they are not interested.

The public has the right to know that Inktomi's presentation of results is corrupted by two undisclosed factors. For money consideration, they will admit millions of pages into the index that don't meet published standards. Furthermore, if a site is selected by their sales department for attention, they will deny that site exposure until they get a payment that in their sole opinion is sufficient.

The reason your June 27 letter was to ensure public disclosure of commercial considerations in search engine results. It is clear that you need to revisit this situation with respect to customers of Inktomi.

Sincerely,

Rob Spooner, President

cc: Bruce Jaffe, Microsoft Corporation
cc: Beverly Thomas, FTC
cc: Dean Forbes, FTC
cc: David Peterschmidt, Inktomi
cc: Timothy Stevens, Inktomi
cc: Vishal Makhijani, Inktomi
cc: John Galatea, Inktomi
cc: John Fleming, Wal-Mart
cc: Carol Jouzaitis,Orbitz

[Matt B]

Wow.

Pretty interesting about the pages with shortcomings being dropped from the index because they don't meet quality standards, but they seem to be welcome if you pay enough.

If that is the case, it makes for some very interesting search results, for which, oddly enough, Ink has been suspect. There have been recent questions about how trusted feeds are reviewed by the SE's. I never heard about any quality reviews until Danny Sullivan mentioned it, even then it came as a surprise.

I'll be interested to hear if Ink or the FTC has any statement in the near future about the quality of results in the Select system.

[ihelpyou]

The last sentence is a killer:
In contrast with Inktomi's welcoming attitude towards spam by paying customers, their attitude towards our site Online Highways (www.ohwy.com) has been hostile. To some degree, quality is subjective, but most people would agree that we meet Inktomi's published guidelines. However, in August, we were assigned a penalty by Inktomi's editors, which had the effect of ending our exposure through MSN and Hotbot. At almost the same moment, we were contacted by a sales person from Inktomi, who suggested that although she didn't know why the problem had come about, we could solve it by paying money to join Index Connect.

[Matt B]

paraphrased

read: If you pay us enough money, it will improve the quality of your site.


If that is the sales pitch, I would like to hear it or see it in writing.

[Advisor]

Originally posted by SEO Guy
paraphrased

read: If you pay us enough money, it will improve the quality of your site. Holy moly...it's a MIRACLE!

[Matt B]

If I pay enough, I may never have to optimize again ! :eek:

[ihelpyou]

Seems to me that Yahoo might have quite the 'hornets nest' on their hands fairly soon??

[robspooner]

Index Connect is marketed in an interesting fashion, not dissimilar to the Mob marketing protection to small restaurant owners. The Mob suggests that they can prevent unfortunate incidents that might be perpetrated by persons unknown. Inktomi suggests that by subscribing to Index Connect, you can be assured that "accidents" will not happen to the indexing of your pages.

Some such "accident" happened to my site in December and they refuse to say what it was. I think it may have been that they spammed themselves by spidering every domain name in existence, and somehow decided that I was spamming them because I have two names for the same site. So does the Wall Street Journal, but I can't think of any other explanation. Between September, when I was pronounced fit, and December when I became unfit, I didn't change that much.

When I discovered the situation, I suggested to Inktomi that I pay them ten cents on a certain subset of my pages where I probably make almost that much per visitor, in return for which they would unblock the balance, where I average only a small return. My "sales rep" said that she would rather I go one cent on all pages, otherwise she "couldn't guarantee" the outcome on those remaining in the generic feed.

Unfortunately, her boss wanted at least four cents and that exceeds my gross revenue per visitor. Consequently, no deal was struck. My one editorial contact would not return my emails, so I couldn't get anything straightened out.

In theory, there was no guarantee that by paying, the editorial blacklist would be lifted, but I think it's clear now that the XML feed is 100% independent of editorial review and can thus be guaranteed de facto. The offer will never be made in writing; it is left to the prospect to figure it out.

I never even wanted the XML feed. I'm perfectly happy with the normal indexing of our pages. In fact, there was absolutely nothing about Index Connect as officially marketed that I wanted. All I ever wanted was fair treatment at a price that didn't exceed all the money I brought in, but that has not been possible.

[Alan Perkins]

New article by Danny Sullivan: Doorways Not Always Bad, At Inktomi (http://searchenginewatch.com/subscribers/articles/03/02-inktomi.html) (subscription required)

[theincrediblehelp]

To answer your question Glengara, all paid inclusion in the Inktomi system will show http://redirect-west.inktomi.com when you do the mouse over on MSN.com. it varies on other engines.

Personally I cant believe the amount of SPAM that most of these SEO resellers are responsible for in the paid inclusion program. And it is not even the resellers that do the most damage it is Inktomi themselves with their own clients that they put in. Of course the example ranking with the european travel keyword is a reseller for Inktomi.

I think the worst part of the paid inclusion is not the rankings for these clients higher than other free optimized sites, but rather most of the listing go directly to the home page of clients through resellers and Inktomi clients. This is obviously what Inktomi wants to avoid in their database, right?

[Kal]

Originally posted by theincrediblehelp
Personally I cant believe the amount of SPAM that most of these SEO resellers are responsible for in the paid inclusion program. Hi theincrediblehelp - please do not lump "most" SEO resellers into the category of spammers, that is confusing and one of the reasons our industry has such a poor and unfair reputation. There are many SEO resellers and paid inclusion users that utilize ethical techniques. If you are referring to SEO's that use spamming techniques, please refer to them as search engine spammers, thank you :).

[theincrediblehelp]

Sorry Kal, I wont lump them ALL into this category, but according to Inktomi guidelines for inclusion into the reseller program they require a unique page for every keyword that clients would like to optimize through a them. Of course many clients do not have this unique content so the reseller SEO is forced to create XML feeds with "fake" content that doesn't even exist on the clients server to capitalize on all the keywords that the client wants. From my checking I see that most of the resellers in the Inktomi SEO paid inclusion program have went down this road at least once. It is not really the SEO fault they are just trying to find the happy medium between gaining keyword rankings for their client and the need for fresh content for Inktomi.