AltaVista -- Paid Inclusion to Free?

hit with a huge crawl...

[MrLucky]

Has anyone switched from a paid inclusion program back to free traffic with AV?

Obviously if there is the potential of having more listings via free traffic it is in my best interest, yet I could imagine the AV algorithm mysteriously only returning a small # of results in hopes that I learn my lesson and return to the PPC world.

Has anyone switched successfully?

Also, anyone know the difference between scooter and mercator these days?

[jdMorgan]

MrLucky,

You should try these questions in the "Pay for Spidering Engines" forums - you
may get more responses there.

From what I've seen, Mercator seems to be part of the "submit a site" process,
while scooter is the autonomous web-crawler. And there's also a scooter
variant with "qa" in the name that may be a dead-link checker.

Jim

[MrLucky]

The only reason I posted in the other forum is that I never really considered the AV program to be a pay-for-spidering program; it's an an XML feed (sort of the equivalent, I suppose). My real question centered around the free spidering they do and it's relationship to the pay program.

Regardless, I think I have part of the answer from AV. Any URLs included in their free program prior to joining the the Trusted Feed program will remain and will continue to be updated. While in the program, AV will continue to spider as normal and include additional pages. This has been important for us as we have made our site more accessible to the spider.

Has anyone had firsthand experience with the switch?

[seth_wilde]

Generally when making the paid to free switch on PFI engines you'll lose the pages initially but then get them back in a couple months..