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Then something strange occurred.... it disappeared. Not too strange then - except that I then found it again, in very last position on the keywords I could find it with at all (very rare ones of course).
This prompts a thought: do AV actually 'ban' all sites they take a dislike to, or just weight them so negatively that they are bottom of the stack? Any ideas?
I'm not sure why they should hammer this site by the way... and I can guarantee it is not badly designed enough to merit last place in the index on content!
No change at all. To be honest it has felt a bit out of my control from the moment AV picked up the description (a very poor one) from Looksmart instead of using anything from the site.
All I do know is that based on everything I know about our business, it should be ranking reasonably well, hence my suspicion that it has been weighted as a punitive measure.
Both can happen, banned or buried.
>> ...it has felt a bit out of my control from the moment AV picked up the description (a very poor one) from Looksmart
Amen. Whatever is going on at AV the last few weeks, I seem to be unable to optimize effctively for them. The LookSmart descrips seem to be one frustrating piece of the puzzle.
Interesting question comes up -- is the LookSmart traffic (including all the partner sites) enough to compensate for the lost traffic their editor's description can cause on AV and elsewhere? This is pretty hard to quantify, but right now, on a gut feel, I'd say no -- AltaVista can mean a whole lot.
I reckon no as well.... Loooksmart has wrecked a couple of placements on AV so I won't be using it again on any established sites.
On the ban v buriel issue, I had a response from AV.... but they didn't seem to read the question. It was standard stuff on how to optimize pages.
I wonder if there is a better email address than the one given on their site.
I would say yes! 100%! The traffic I get from MSN alone makes up for any loss in traffic from AV. But then again I never submit my homepage to Looksmart. I always submit doorways to insure that they can be tweeked later and to avoid the very problem that you guys are describing......
I have been banned on hundreds of domains for months...only to have them all suddenly return. One which had been banned since August of last year, suddenly returned with an extremely competitive word and has been at the top for weeks. It is returning many thousands of hits per hour. I am banking the money for the downturn that will almost certainly come. If I knew what I did, I would do more...but I did nothing.
I have emailed AV several times today, receiving answers from several AV people.
On the credit side, they do at least respond, which has to be rightly applauded (even thoigh much of it is obviously standard text... but not all. Full marks for not ignoring customers.
On the debit side... they never respond with an answer to the correct question. I simply get high level explanations regarding ranking, etc. Thus far they have failed to tell me whether there is a penalty weighting and if so how to get it lifted. All very frustrating.
On general SEO for AV.... I gave up weeks ago!
I can only a response like this from them no matter what I ask. 3 times already on different questions.
"Yes, it seems that way"
I wish they would lower their vagueness level some.
