inktomi listing not appearing

Dear group,

For about a year I had a site which was listed #1 in ink under many search terms. The site was a mirror site pointed to my main site for ex ..www.mirrorsite.com was pointed to www.mainsite.com. the mirror site was listed through a PFI service.

Around Oct., I received a message from PFI wanting to know if I wanted to renew my listing, which I declined. I thought the site would remain active. Unfortuntately the site was removed from ink's index.

As of today I can not get my mainsite or mirror site relisted with ink. I have resubmitted but no results. Any suggestions?

Also...should I be using a robot.txt file with my site

The spiders are of two different kinds: The free spiders (they might come around), and the paid spider that do come around often. Some SEO consultants belive that there is a "fix" ensuring that the material indexed by the paid spiders do rank higher. If you awant the free indexing, you will just have to wait, get more backlinks, wait, get even more backlinks etc.

Is it possible I was penalized for some reason? Also, I did renew the paid portion of the PFI, however i only listed my main url, not the mirror site.

Inktomi tries to avoid listing duplicate content, so if you have a true mirror site than you will only get a listing for you main site.
To get a double listing you need to make the identical pages 10-15% different. Just include some content dynamicly trough the site and you might be back in business.

The best of luck.

Is there any way to find out if I have a penalty?

Simply send an email from webmaster@yourdomain.tld to
spamcrusader@inktomi.com and ask.

If you do it before business hours Monday you will have your answer before the end of businesshours Tuesday.

Just out of curiosity....if it's a penalty, can I get it lifted? If so how

If there is a penalty, you will be informed of what needs to be done when they send you the reply.

Got one quick question....I have noticed that my listing was not only removed from inktomi, but from alltheweb and lycos. I do have some listings, however these are subpages with other domain sites (mirror sites...for example I have an 800 number and my main site is www.main.com, as well as www.800main.com. I do not have any of my main sites listed.

What is strange is that I was the #1 lising prior to me being removed. My site does not have a robot.txt in it. Is the lack of a robot.txt the possible cause for this problem?

A robots.txt is not manditory. You will never suffer any penalties caused by your lack of robots.txt

Do you have any thoughts as to why my index page is missing from 3 search engines (inktomi, alltheweb and lycos). My index page was in these engines and had #1 position prior to the removal. Could the failure to renew PFI cause this?

Yes, it may very well be.