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a spelling mistake [altavista.com]
someplace I've never heard of [altavista.com]
a nice song [altavista.com]
I must have had several hundred referrals over the weekend - most for things which have nothing to do with my content. I will be asking AV the question - but anyone any idea why?
Maybe they decided to promote the new paid listing....
During the weekend the Altavista DB seemed switching from unpaid to paid listings.
Do you still have more refferrals now?
I do have a mention of logos (example 1);
I am in the Clogher Valley (example 2);
My site does talk about text (example 3).
And for this one (just come in) - I suppose it went for the word directory [altavista.com]. Not quite what I was optimising for though!
Probably the index will be based on click-trough; at the beginning first you arrive and less competion you have on any word in your pages.
In this case we should apply to the paid service and set-up text rich pages (themed pages).
Any other experience here?
P.S. Are you a supporter of AV paid listing..?
The thing is that with PPC becoming so prevalent, a hit fon anything is worth something to somebody as long as it is targetted. The problem until now has been that we only knew they found us under those weird keywords AFTER they left our site and we checked our trackers. Now we can send people to what they are looking for and what generates some income.
We started thinking on this back when link popularity started playing such a big role in placement. Alta Vista has always had a problem of showing the wrong content for the wrong keywords. Any of you ever have a problem with a credit card client's site coming up on AV for web hosting keyowrds only because you had a webhosting client linked to that credit card site? Well, so did I. It got better but now it looks like we're having to deal with it again.
Don't even get me started on Yahoo and the other directories. The way they take your title and description and build keyword lists means we all have to deal with getting hits that we never targeted and offer little or no content for. Keyword delivery at least lets me indentify the referrer when they hit the site so that I can display specific content based on the keyword they used to find me with.
(edited by: NFFC at 5:01 pm (gmt) on July 2, 2001
I would feel the exact same way if I had found the first web postiion gold site. I would want to tell the SEO community about it and list the url only because I see a possible use for it in our industry. It is just unfortunate that I happen to own the site. The reason I happen to own the site is who is going to develop tools that address specific problems within our industry if it isn't the very same people that are in the industry?
Maybe this will help, maybe not, but one thing is certain, I've been in this business a long time and I know most, if not all, of the problems we all face everyday. Who better to spend their time, money and resources to develop tools that help to overcome those problems?
I have felt for a long time that we as an industry may need to change our focus from working harder to working smarter, especially in light of the very fast rise in expenses we now need to incur in order to do our jobs. I just feel that those of us who are in a position to expend resources on development should do so. And for those that do, there needs to be somewhere to be able to discuss ways to use those developments and what the industry needs in terms of improvements to those developments to stay ahead of this ever changing game of top placement.
This thread is a perfect example of what we're up against. Makemetop has just spent hard earned money and a great deal of time to pay Alta Vista for the privelege of providing them with relevant content, who in essence just put the screws to him. So what are we all going to do? Keep paying Alta vista to come up under keywords we never intended to place under and just take all those wasted hits and throw them away like they have no value, or is somebody going to try to do something about it and provide possible solutions?
Now, all I ask, is that you give me the benefit of the doubt and accept that this program really may have some positive impact on our industry. At the very least, I think I deserve the respect that being one of the grandfathers of this industry should afford me. Take a look at the program. Don't buy anything! There is a free version available that will show you exactly what it is and what it does. If it sucks, tell me and tell me why. If it doesn't suck, then tell me how it can be better, be more powerful and make us all more money.
I don't feel lucky, I don't want the hits (but I'm willing to listen to how I can make them useful Bob - stickymail?) and I feel it downgrades AV. I'm nervous about reporting this to AV in case they view the site as spam and ban me while investigating - hence my query to InfoSpider.
Prior to paid inclusion I was listed in the top 10-20 for all my major terms for over a year. Now I come up for all kinds of cr*p and want the obvious algo glitch sorted without being penalized. My idea was to test paid inclusion to see if it could be used for my clients. Now I'm scared it could backfire on me :(
Not often people complain about getting loads of hits and top 10 rankings.
Anyone from AV want to contact me privately to get the full logs?
I can't believe they went ahead with their pay program while they are still serving results like this.
>>>Now I'm scared it could backfire on me.
I wonder how Microsoft will react when they find out their MS Flight Simulator page is showing up under various adult terms. As well as other large corporations.
I've sent a few notes off to AV explaining this but they don't seem to care.
My big concern is "What if" this new system shuffles all of your previously ranking pages, into a new position, and Then they decide you "fooled them."
AV really needs to fix this ASAP, before the users get fed up with irrelevant results that they are creating. Fighting against spamdexing is tough enough, without automating irrelevance from within their own system.
Is this some sort of ranking enhancer for paid inclusion that has gone horribly wrong?
In fairness to AV I do pretty well on some competitive terms I DID target - so it isn't all bad.
I think that you will acquire a lot of clients in these days!
Imagine all those companies seeing you on the top for their targeted keywords!
They will contact you to optimize their sites.
You know, I hear that the algos change and drop people, weird things happen to rankings, etc... but THIS takes the cake. Tooooo funny! I hope you DO get some results from it though. You have many bilingual SEOs?
