Altavista guidelines needed

How to rank better in this engine *and* Google

[MeditationMan]

So far I've devoted most of my time and energy to optimizing for Google, but AV still seems to be popular, and so I thought I'd better give it some attention.

What are the most important ways to optimize for AV? How is it possible to have a page that does well in both Google and AV?

I have to say that the results in AV look pretty trashy. The first result for my keyword has a title that looks *exactly* like this:

"Widget and Keyword, Widget - Keyword in Country, Widget - Keyword Tours in Country, Widget - Keyword Travel in County, Doodad Tours in Country, Widget Tourism in Country". If that ain't spam, what is?

More hopefully, the site that's #6 in Google for my keyword is #2 in Google, so obviously you don't have to completely prostitute your site to get in the top ten. So how do you do this?

[MeditationMan]

Hi,

Does anyone have *any* suggestions for how to optimize for Altavista?

[jeremy goodrich]

Lol, no answers in a day, hu?

I guess that's because for most of us Altavista fell off the face of the earth...perhaps a year ago?

I'd say stick to the same basic stuff you use for Google...and at one point, Alta was doing click tracking...clicking on your own stuff helped. :)

[rfgdxm1]

I just pulled a real bonehead move. I upload the index.htm page of a directory into root on one of my domains. Took me 20 minutes to realize it and change it back. I check the logs. In that 20 minutes Scooter came by and grabbed that page. There's a chance I may get blown out of Altavista now. :( Then it occured to me. Even though I have excellent Altavista SERPs, Traffic is basically zilch. No hits on both domains from Altavista in the last 24 hours. As such, I'm not gonna slit my wrists if I end up getting dropped from Altavista. ;)

[MeditationMan]

Lol, no answers in a day, hu?

Sigh! I guess I'm used to the faster pace of forum 3 :)

I'd looked at some stats on searchenginewatch that claimed AV had a third as many searches per day as Google. Kinda surprised me since I'd written AV off a long time ago. But looking closer at the stats, the claim for traffic volume comes from AV itself, and other media metrics organizations don't even have AV in the top ten for traffic, which makes me think my first hunch was right and I should ignore AV.

Looking at AV's search results should have been a tip-off. Do the people working there have no shame?

Anyway, thanks for the response.

[ikbenhet1]

Yes, pay the fee.

Since i have payed for 1 listing thrugh webwurld, ALL of my sites on the pay-included site rank high.

[rfgdxm1]

My 2 drug use harm reduction sites have a demographic user base that is mostly teenagers and young adults. I have excellent AV SERPs on key search terms, even single word ones. Over 100 unique users is a slow day for these 2 sites, and they have minimal return vistors. They are heavily SE dependent. From checking my logs, hits from AV are barely worth mentioning. And, I get *tons* of hits from Google. Thus, I have to conclude that if AV has any substantial user base, it is with older users. Some have speculated that since years ago AV used to be the bees knees WRT search engines, their user base may skew older. Is *anyone* getting significant AV traffic to their sites? All I can say is that in my case AV is near meaningless.