AltaVista's cycles and patterns?

Are there any?

[scooch]

I've been visited by the av spider (Scooter == AV, right?) for many weeks now, but only casual drivebys, nothing too big.

But for the past 3 or 4 days, Scooter has unpacked its bags and camped out. I'm getting the full-site spider treatment right now -- thousands of pages.

Does this mean anything predictable like with Google? Can I expect to get fully indexed by altavista soon?

Just wondering if anybody's seen a pattern.

thanks.

[seth_wilde]

AV isn't nearly as predictable as google. But they have been activily adding new sites lately and you'll probably find yourself in their index in the not so distant future.

related thread
[webmasterworld.com...]

[Vampyre]

Just last week, I had a site get listed in AV a couple of days after being spidered by Scooter.

[scooch]

Thanks for the replies.

Interestingly, a few days later, I'm presently getting deep-crawled by Mercator-2.0. Allegedly another AV spider?

Coincidence?

[scooch]

One more observation.

Mercator is going through blocks of my pages in alphabetical order. Clearly it already has a list of my pages.

I don't recall Mercator ever going deep before. It must be getting its list from somewhere. Scooter.

--scooch (no relation to Scooter ;) )

[Rumbas]

What triggers a crawl from AV?
We know Google spiders Yahoo, ODP regulary and a listing here often results in a fast visit by Google.

How about AV - do they sit on the directories waiting too?

[msgraph]

I'm beginning to think that Alta runs through ODP quite often, well at least lately. I've seen new sites listed in their index within a week of grabbing an ODP spot.

[heini]

Last I heard AV is on a 60 days cycle for complete updates. But do they really do complete-in-one-go updates anymore? Or rather updating in portions?

BTW: welcome to the board, Vampyre!

[Vampyre]

"What triggers a crawl from AV?"

AV started crawling my site within a few days of it being listed in Yahoo. Since I haven't submitted the site to AV, I'm guessing that the Yahoo listing triggered the crawl.