AltaVista US weeding out foreign sites?

This could become a real problem for non dot-coms.

[rencke]

A friend of mine has been staring at the AV results with growing panic for the past 6 months. His brand new 400+ page all English site with partly unique content, highly useful in a niche market for people all over the world, has only 10 of its pages in altavista.com and no amount of submission has changed that.

But it is a .se site and when I looked in altavista.se every single page was there. Problem is that his market is worldwide and even Swedes often pick altavista.com over altavista.se even though AV make a sales pitch for the local language version in a new window everytime they are accessed.

So it would seem that AV is weeding out non dot-coms from their main index, placing them in the growing number of AV international versions instead. If this is true, having a national domain could become a real problem for sites with a worldwide market. And a real pain in the neck for those in countries where the surfers prefer altavista.com over their national version.

Does anyone know anything about this? Time to get a dot-com?

[rcjordan]

>Time to get a dot-com?
Until something changes the public mindset that dotcom is the underlying "operating platform" of the web and everything else is inferior, my answer is always "yes."

>Does anyone know anything about this?
Not really, but doesn't it seem logical that any SE would choose to populate their international offerings this way?

[rencke]

>doesn't it seem logical that any SE would choose to populate their international offerings this way?

Not if they want to give relevant answers. The exclusive service this guy sells knows no national boundaries. Sticking his site inside a national version of AV is not just his loss, but AV's and their visitors' as well. Plus, when this weeding becomes widely known, dot-com registrations will explode as national domains are abandoned and AV will find itself back at square 1 again. I for one, will strongly recommend dot-com for anything in English, and you too I see, rc.

[rcjordan]

>as national domains are abandoned
There were articles about a month ago asking why dotUS domains were so out of favor. For about 4 years now, I have been the registrant for about 45 3rd-level dotUS city names and the only thing that makes them even remotely worthwhile is the fact that we gave them different IP numbers. US sites have already abandoned our national designation.

>dot-com registrations will explode as national domains are abandoned and AV will find itself back at square 1 again.
I could make the argument that AV plans to use this as a sort process outside their algorithm. English sites end up getting back in under their dotcom, distinctly national sites stay in the proper locale.

[rencke]

So splitting up multilingual sites would be the solution, then? And if possible stick each language into a national domain and English into dot-com. If not possible, then dot-com for non-national language and submission to local engine? Known to work in France, anyway.

Believe me, rc. That is a whole new ballgame opening up. At least for us simple country folks.

[rcjordan]

>So splitting up multilingual sites would be the solution, then?
Yes, that's exactly what I would do if I published a multilingual site. Of course, you're talking to a fellow that since '95 has operated 30 or 40 dotcom domains and 'binds' them together as a common site, so this doesn't seem like much of a stretch of that logic to me.

added:
It also has the added benefit of reducing your dependence upon a single SE, spreads the risk.

[seth_wilde]

Ideally your going to want to have a .com for an english site, there's no questions about that. I'm still wondering if there's a penalty or if its just some kind of database/spidering difference between the AV .se and the AV .com.

[oLeon]

just a question:
do you search for #keyword in *any language* or *english* ?

I realize that the results are different in these searches (I searches for *webpromotion*, and I really donīt know why I got so many german and other language-results under *any language* in stead of *english*). It might be important where you come from -I deleted all my cookies, but the results are the same as before.

So, I canīt see that the germans results donīt appear.

[henki]

AltaVista Sweden say they are going to force all swedish surfers to the av.se Much like Lycos and Google does today. They say it is going to happen this month.

AV.se did filter out almost all foreign domains in January, but accepted new submissions from other domain suffix than .se

We have not seen our non US clients drop from AV.com, but I believe it is tuffer to get in with a non us domain name these days.

This is the kind of questions that we are going to ask AltaVista at the IMS conferense in two weeks. I will post you what they answer.

[rencke]

rcjordan>spreads the risk
Excellent point. Why don't I come up with brilliant stuff like that?

oLeon>do you search for #keyword in *any language* or *english*
I just did the standard host:url without setting language, since the site is 99% in English.
Good idea. I think I will play around a little with language settings to see what happens.

henki>AltaVista Sweden say they are going to force all swedish surfers to the av.se
If they do that, they will loose my faithful patronage after 5 years. Have been fighting off that extra window they open for months now. Hello Fast, I'm on my way!

henki>AV.se did filter out almost all foreign domains in January
To make room for the weed outs from the main index perhaps? What do you think? (I still have 1095 se-pages in AV.com, but I guess doomsday may be approaching)

seth_wilde>I'm still wondering if there's a penalty...
Doubt it. It is a clean and nice site with great content and no hanky-panky. Could it be that they are weeding non dot-com sites with low linkage? The site that prompted me to start this thread is so new that it has only a handful. Any observations anyone?

[seth_wilde]

I was thinking more along the lines of no penalty. I was thinking it could just be that the .se and .com use totally different spiders and different databases. If this is true it's probably just a matter of time before you see the rest of the pages spidered (after all you've seen more pages appear since last week).

[rencke]

Could be I suppose, but six whole months!? I believe the first 200+ pages were submitted late February and I told my friend that he might have to wait three, even four months for them to make the index. The first page they listed - in March or early April - had links to most of the rest of the site. Henki, oLeon and I will ask the questions when we meet AV here in Stockholm in a couple of weeks and one of us will post our findings in your forum Seth. Unless someone drops in with an answer before that....

[pete]

Renke - "Could it be that they are weeding non dot-com sites with low linkage?

It has always been a struggle getting our countries extension "co.za" into A.V with good listings. But, most of these sites are hosted in S.A and as a result, spiders struggle to make it accross the trans-atlantic link. However ,I have found that that even our sites which we host in the northern hemisphere with this extension struggle and as a result I always go for a .com.

I think that your friend will have to register a .com site and use that as his major SE marketing tool for the big US engines. Difficulty here is that after a period of 6 mths, he may have fantastic listings in other engines. Adding another english site to the mix could result in duplicate listings and penalties and the challenge will therefore be to make the site sufficiently dissimilar. Which for me, is still one of the million $ questions that I am tackling and stumbling over every once in awhile.

[rmccabe]

I know that .cc, .tv and .ws have been licensed to US companies and are being heavily promoted here. Any idea how these will fare?

[cirelle]

Hi All,

We had a phone inquirey from a perspective customer (us) that indicated he wanted a .tv because he heard it was faster.

go figure..

c

[rmccabe]

Well that's correct, isn't it? I mean, .tv signals are broadcast and don't rely on slow dial-up modems.

[cirelle]

hohoho... hehehe...hahaha

in the imortal words of elvis:
thankyee thankyee thankyee

and now for something completely different....

I am really surprised at the low level of scooter appearances these past days... I make a point of trapping as many of those spiders as possible (they eat flies, or is that flys) oh well....

c