What is the deal with Altavista?

[toxic]

My site used to be listed in Altavista about six months ago. For some reason it got dropped, and now I cannot get relisted. I am in almost all the other major directories and search engines. I can't understand why I cannot get back on Altavista. Any ideas?

Thanks

[chris_f]

Altavista use a rotating index. They have between 5 and 10 database which each take it in turns to power their search results. The chances are you are still in the index that you were listed in, however, altavista may now be using a different database. For some reason, replication does not always occur.

I would suggest you resubmit every month until you reappear. This should get you in all the indexes.

Chris.

[Jaze]

Huh, resubmit every month?

as I understood it, submit once wait for two/three months. AV places a penalty on manually submitted pages that lasts for up to 2 to 3 months.

If you keep submitting you're never going to see your site in the top three pages....

Of course, correct me if I'm wrong!

[zeus]

I dont think there will be any panelty if you resubmit the page every month, but if you do it everyday that could be a problem.

zeus

[chris_f]

Jaze,

Zeus has hit the nail on the head. What I said is 100% accurate.

Chris.

[przero2]

chris, first time i read of someone being 100% accurate:). keeps me puzzled if you are one of the insiders at AV

[Jaze]

Just something I heard once. I stand corrected :)

[msgraph]

>>>>They have between 5 and 10 database which each take it in turns to power their search results.

5-10 different rotating indexes on AV? I have NEVER seen 5-10 different rotating indexes on AV. I don't know where you get your info....

[Air]

>..between 5 and 10 database

I remember that as an old theory, but it was never 5 - 10 databases, more like 2 or 3. The original theory surfaced as an attempt to explain some erratic results, with sites appearing and disappearing at various times. The thought was that until you got into all of the databases your site would not reliably be included in all SERPs.

In addtion to the multiple database theory it was also thought that AV just had a bug, in retrospect a bug seems more likely :)

[skibum]

In or out, it probably won't make mre than a 2-3% difference in traffic levels to most sites, if that.

[chris_f]

keeps me puzzled if you are one of the insiders at AV

I work in the shadows. Do I actually exist. Am I GoogleGuy? ;).

Only joking. However, if you ask a question you might get an answer.

I have NEVER seen 5-10 different rotating indexes on AV. I don't know where you get your info...

A VERY trusted source who would know.

I remember that as an old theory, but it was never 5 - 10 databases, more like 2 or 3.

The actual figure changes. I believe there are around 6 at the minute. 4 for the site and 2 for development.

Chris.

[mayor]

>>submit once wait for two/three months

Manually submitted new site to AV on Sept 5, 2002. Saw visitor in log coming from AV search on Oct. 13, 2002. There could have been AV surfer visits sooner, but I haven't looked.

So this record says submit once, wait one/two months.

Just don't worry about a tidal wave of traffic from Alta Vista but then they say a penny today is a dollar (or yen, euro, peso, yuan, lira, pound, wampum etc) tommorow.

[josmond]

I have over 300 pages listed in google for at least 6 months - but altavista only has one page listed. Is this saying altavista index is old and out of date or I have to pay to get in the results?

[chris_f]

Josmond,

Generally you don't have to pay to get into Altavista.

Chris

[heini]

My experience over the last months has been that AV spiders quite a lot, not as much though as Google, Fast and Ink.
All pages got eventually picked up and showed in the index.
And once they were in they showed all the time.

[josmond]

I have seen the av spider bang through my site, quite deep, for the last few months, but it doesn't seem to do anything with it, is this normal?

[chris_f]

If AV has visited you I would sit back and wait. It will take some time for the new index to go live and your site to be replicated.

Chris.

[msgraph]

>>>A VERY trusted source who would know.

I'm sorry but I'm confused.

You said 5-10 db's take it in turns to power their results, but now you are saying that 4 take their turns for the results while the remaining two are for testing.

Is it 4 or 5-10 that show up in the public results?

I'm not trying to disprove anything you said, maybe you are right, who knows. But, if you are going to say that you are 100% accurate, you need to back that up.

[Marcia]

I'm considering the possibility that there are some crossed signals and somewhere along the line someone got confused between Alta Vista and the fact that Google has a number of data centers for load balancing and that during updates you can pick up different results even from different computers near each other because they'll happen to hit on a different data center and things are in flux.

Here's what I do with Alta Vista - all hand submissions. When I first started out I heard that it's a safe practice to only submit 5 pages at a time to any search engine from a given site in any one day. I like to keep things simple and have always stuck to that. I'd submit 5 of the main pages - if there were /directories/ I'd submit the index pages from those. Then when more pages were added to the site or something changed, that's when I'd submit more - the new or changed pages. Maybe. And I liked to add a page or so (on small sites) every month or so for a while and submit it to keep it rolling and give a reminder.

Having heard that there was an aging factor with AV at the time, it wasn't unusual or disturbing to see a site come on in the 50's at first, then move up to the 20's and on up from there. Being unscientific and a bit of a nag, I'd occasionally submit a couple of pages that hadn't been submitted before to try to give Scooter another nudge.

Now Alta Vista has their ransom note code for submission of 5 pages at a time and they're slow and have changed a lot, but it's still done the same way. Not a dime has ever been paid and everything ends up indexed with no confusion or stress.

They've got 21 pages now of a site that's been up about 8-9 months (the dynamic part of the site is excluded with robots.txt), have had them in there for a while and what they're showing is about 2-3 months old. So I submitted the index page and 3 /directory/ main pages this morning as reminder of the most important main parts of the site. Scooter *will* be around, as always.

Something a little nit-picky, but we all get into habits. I generally keep a browser window open and copy and paste from the address bar right at the actual web pages to submit. That way there aren't any typos and it's a timely check to make sure the site is up at the moment. Plus, for some quirky reason I like to have that trailing slash in there when I submit.

Very simple, and if there are no problems it works.

toxic, the site may have been down, there may be a problem with the robots.txt which it's a good idea to have AND validate:

robots.txt validator [searchengineworld.com]

Run some pages of the site through the Search Engine Spider Simulator [searchengineworld.com] for good measure, too.

Something else I read as a newbie which stuck, but can't remember whether it was Inktomi or Alta Vista. Someone had had a problem with their site being indexed and reported that they'd written to them and were told that there was something preventing index, that their robots meta tags were wrong.

They were using "INDEX=ALL" and said that they'd had to change to <meta name="robots" content="index,follow"> which is common syntax for it. Check that out also, just in case. It can't hurt to stay with what's standard.

Definitely run a sampling of pages through an html validator. There are sometimes errors that can be serious even though they're small things - like an unclosed tag in the head section causing confusion.

html validator [searchengineworld.com]

Check simple basics, sometimes big problems can be caused by little things.