International AV's and themes

Are 'little' AV's using theme algo?

[The Yellow Brand]

Theme-style optimization has had success with the main AltaVista. I'm now planning to expand to one of the national AltaVistas. Are they theme-friendly like the big one or should I just focus on creating good pages and forget themes when I optimize for the national engine?

[Brett_Tabke]

Very friendly since the international AV databases are still 3/4ths empty (comparatively) of local domains. Add in the fact that Europe is way, way behind the US in optimization activity, and there is lots of room to play.

[engine]

Yes, that's my finding too.
I'm also finding the indexing times are much better than av.com The international scooters turn up pretty quick and regularly.

Work on the basis they need to build their local databases to encourage users and, more importantly, the advertisers.

[seth_wilde]

TYB - Welcome to the forums!

I'm not very familiar with the international engines. But I was able to get some good info from NFCC about AV UK.

"I only "know".co.uk, algo is completely different. No clustering, title is *all* if the keywords are not in the title forget it. Much more straight forward than AV.com in some way's, although the lack of clustering can be a problem if someone nails the algo. In addition "AltaVista.co.uk accepts only URLs from the domains: uk, gb, ie, im, gg, je, .com, .net and .org"

Previously banned domains at .com once ranked well at .co.uk, they seem to have gone now.

>Are they theme-friendly like the big one or should I just focus on creating good pages

The on page criteria takes precedence, *at the moment*."

[makemetop]

To show how unlike AV US and UK AV are - have a look at AV UKs recommendations for getting a good listing:

"It is however possible for you to control how your page is indexed by using META tags to specify both additional keywords to index, and a short description. Let's suppose your page contains:

<META name="description" content="We specialise in grooming pink poodles.">

<META name="keywords" content="pet grooming, Palo Alto, dog">

AltaVista will then do two things:

It will index both fields as words, so a search on either poodles or dog will match. It will return the description with the URL."

This is nothing like AV US who is saying meta tags don't matter very much!