How did Alta find our pages?

[Alecto]

Once upon a time, when we were optimizing for AV as our main engine, we submitted our index and then three other secondary pages, to see what kind of results we'd get with the different pages. That was about a year ago. Things changed a lot since then.

Google came around and indexed our entire site before we were finished optimizing for AV, and Google started delivering results, which changed our focus off AV and onto Google.

When we were comfortable with Google, I decided in late December to go back to AV and start submitting the rest of our pages to them. (at that time we had about 130 pages). I began submitting them at a rate of three a day, and after a few days went to AV to see if they were there. So what do I see? AV already had 91 of our pages indexed! How did they do that? I thought Scooter just came around when called. I'm thinking they grabbed all our pages at once from some other db.

The bad part about seeing all our pages in AV was that with all those pages we still weren't getting any significant amount of traffic. But, in the last few weeks I've noticed a big change. AV is becoming a player for us. Whatever they're doing, keep it up.

Also, one thing about AV and meta keywords. AV is the only engine I've seen that brings people to our site using the foreign language meta keywords we put in. If I decide to adjust our pages for AV in any way, the first thing I would do would be to load up on foreign words in the meta keywords.

[Brett_Tabke]

Alta will pick up pages. Did you have some inbound links to those pages they may have picked up on? Do you have some outbound links on those pages where people may have submitted them for you?

Alta will crawl a few pages here and there, but mostly they have to have some link pop before they will do it. It is pretty rare to get a crawl by Alta, but they can do it.

[Alecto]

Hey Brett...

Each one of our pages has a number of links outward, but we're still setting up, so most of the sites we link to don't know we're linking to them yet. I can't imagine any of them submitted us to AV. And other sites have only recently begun to put up a few links to our pages.

All of our pages are linked to the index page. It may be that Scooter is following pages off the index. If that's the case, then I'm just surprised I never noticed the activity. I can't believe they indexed so many pages without my realizing it. But then, maybe having my eyes focused on googlebot, I just forgot about poor old Scooter.

[Brett_Tabke]

I know of a couple of people who run auto submitters based on unique referrals. They see a new referral and the site autosubmits it to search engine. Rare -- yes, but that is the lengths people are going to now that Google has turned the world recip link insane.

[numediagirl]

Hello! As a web sit consultant I constantly run checks on sites that are linking to my clients if they show up in one searchengine I submit the URL that is linked to me (providing there is relavent content on the site) and I submit that URL to other search engines. Link popularity is something I know helps in some engines! :)

[glauber]

I do the same (not automatically, but if i see a new referrer, i check it out and submit it by hand to all the spiders). Consider it a free service from a friend! ;)

[Alecto]

When I was tweaking my pages for a search engine one of my concerns was that someone else might come along and submit my site to other engines when I wasn't ready. My main concern was that I might get stuck with a poorly optimized page on an engine that might never update it. Or that the contact email for the site wouldn't be my own.

But that's when I was younger. Now I'm generally more prepared. And now it seems, from what I hear in this forum, that submitting other people's sites is becoming a common thing.

So, numediagirl and glauber, if you ever come across my site as a referrer, feel free to go ahead and submit it. Only two things. One, please get in touch with me so I can give you a contact email address to use. And two, if you do go to the trouble of submitting me to search engines, then why not go the distance and get me a Looksmart listing as well? (Express Submit, if you please) :)