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I was reading thier Advanced Search Features [doc.altavista.com]
And found that they might be trying to use a similar PageRank system like Google.
"Anchors have become far more important than they were a few years ago, as search engines become more sophisticated in determining the importance of particular Web pages and sites and in deciding how to rank them so that the best, most relevant matches appear. If you have information about Halley's Comet at your site and someone searches for "halley's comet," your page will be more likely to appear near the top of the list if other pages link to it, or to other pages at your site, and use the term "halley's comet" in the anchors for those links. So if you have good content and other sites have linked to it, you might want to check the anchors that they are using and encourage the Webmasters of those other sites to use meaningful anchors, not just "click here" or the URL itself."
AUTOMATIC & MANUAL PHRASES uncommon words [doc.altavista.com]
AltaVista gives more weight to uncommon words. So if you type "fish avocado this," pages that have just "avocado" will appear before pages that have just "fish." Also, pages that have both words will appear before pages that have only one or the other. And of the pages that have both those words, the pages where "avocado" appears near the beginning or in the title will be at the top of the list. And for purposes of ranking, the word "this" will be ignored, because it appears on so many pages.
Time to go work on those link exchanges some more...
Thanks
Here is a ADVANCED SEARCH CHEAT SHEET [doc.altavista.com]
This also cought my eye:
"Because AltaVista generates a unique URL for each query," here [doc.altavista.com]
It might be for tracking click through's?
Back to more diggin
Lucky
AV has liked named anchors for quite some time.
One of the techniques I like to use for this is with my Gateway pages.
First, I place a small graphic at the top of the page, and I name that graphic with a keyword phrase (i.e. web-design)or whatever.
Next, I create a Gateway page that looks like a site map.
On the Gateway page I use text links that match the named anchor that I am linking to. I surround the link with a little bit of keyword rich content in the form of a short description, and then I link to the named anchor.
Hope that helps.
>First, I place a small graphic at the top of the page
hehe - how small? ;) Let me ask you this. What's the difference between using that small graphic with the alt tag and using what would be in the alt tag in regular text -with either a decent font size, or an H2? And/or as part of the page title?
This find is very interesting to me, because I started using keyword phrases (and I do mean whole phrases) in the anchor text for linking within sites, at the very beginning, when I first started, quite by accident - it was just a hunch.
I started to notice similar results with AV and Google for the same pages - although not quite always identical, close enough to sit up and take notice. And it was happening consistently - on new sites, mind you, with no links at all, although there would be one, at least temporarily, from my own site.
I've started to put up a temporary index page for a new site while it's under construction, with a link from one of my own sites that's already indexed, including only one other site page on the new site (with a text link of course) to get a bit of a head start.
There's just been a noticeable change, both with Google and AV, and what's interesting is that on a fairly new site, there's a similar result on the two, with a difference of 2 places in ranking, for two separate pages out of the same site. Google has "word word keyword" listed #3, the index page, and AltaVista, while it dropped the Google listed page down from #11 to #29, after a title change, has a /directory/ ranked #1 with the page optimized for "keyword word word" - both the same keyword, the other words different.
I'd sit and look wide-eyed when I'd see this happening, and spent many weeks researching to find out "how'd that happen?" Even though there were differences, these elements were used on a consistent basis.
I've even seen some interesting results for pages with outbound links done this way - fascinating enough to be tempted to try a little RFing one of these days (something harmless like "ugly web pages"). I prolly won't, but it's an interesting thought - especially with your "little graphic" jobbie there, JK. Ya gotta be careful who you share your little secrets with. ;)
Thanks lucky, great find - you've really been "doing your homework."
AV's been using "link popularity" for some time now....The problem that they seem to be having is that they can't decide how heavily they should weight it in their algo, over the past year the weight seems to have changed many times....
"AUTOMATIC & MANUAL PHRASES"
This is known as Inverse Document Frequency (IDF). If you check out AV Belgium [altavista.advalvas.be] it gives the serps numerical scores. You can see the influence of IDF on different words by comparing scores (the higher the score the more uncommon the word)
"AltaVista generates a unique URL for each query"
I don't think this has anything to do with tracking. I think it's done to make it easier to link to serps.
"updated daily"
Now that remaindes to be seen.
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Our [doc.altavista.com] own team of professional editors refines the LookSmart directory to:
Check for errors and duplication and eliminating dead links
Rank the Web sites by relevance using AltaVista algorithms.
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How [doc.altavista.com] Are AltaVista Directory Contents Ranked?
Human editors place Web sites into categories and subcategories. Within each category, Web sites are listed in order of relevance. Relevance is based on AltaVista algorithms that take into account such things as the frequency of words on the page and how close the words are to the top of the page, proximity of words, popularity of the site, text in HTML meta tags, and many other factors.
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LINK POPULARITY [doc.altavista.com]
The level of the directory in which the page is found. Higher is considered more important. If a page is buried too deep, the crawler simply won't go that far and will never find it.
