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If any of you have been to the AltaVista Submission page recently you might have noticed a change.
[altavista.com...]
AltaVista now has three ways to submit a site.
1) Submit via the free Ransom Note
2) Paid Submit via Info-Spider
3) Paid Submit via what they are calling "Trusted Feed"
The new program allows you to submit 500 URL's to AltaVista, and as you might expect AV lists lots of advantages to this new program.
[altavista.com...]
Additionally, of paticular interest is the fact that pricing is based on a PPC model.
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Trying to find some more info about this program I contacted AltaVista, and this is what I can relay.
First, the program is only for those domains and domains plus sub.domains that have 500+ total URL's. In other words, if you have three clients and between the three they have 1,200 pages - you can't get them in the program.
To me this sounds decidedly unfair to the SEO community, and as such I'd appreciate your feedback on this issue.
Second, the program is being pitched as the solution for web pages which are difficult to crawl. Users who participate in the program will be able to submit custom content. As stated by AltaVista, "Trusted Feed enables submission of custom titles, keywords and abstracts."
When I spoke to AltaVista about his I asked, then, what made this any different from cloaking? But the explaination was lacking.
The Rep explained that cloaking was a deceptive practice whereby the content presented to the spider was different than what was seen by the viewer - (i.e. misleading). OF course, I tried to explain that while this was possible with cloaking, that was not the value of it. But I guess we just didn't connect mentally on this issue.
Anyway, I'd appreciate your feedback on this as well. Getting your Title in AltaVista and also your Description is fairly easy. Except for the cloaking-type component of this program, I can't see the value of this "custom title and description" delivery.
Thanks.
Altavista has shot itself in the foot again IMHO
Knowing their incomes from "partner sites listing" they want to do it theirselve.
It might be not only inexpensive, but another way to test the keyphrases, which adwords is so good for. Just for big sites. Not pleasant though, that it's a minimum of 500 pages, they're blocking out a lot of good, relevant sites, including Mom & Pop.
I wrote a detailed email, asking a lot of questions, including whether several third level domains would qualify as one. They've left out a lot of information, probably wanting their salespeople to get sales prospect names and info.
Oh, and JK, I noticed that today is a year since your arrival here. Happy Anniversary!
IMHO of course..;)
According to the reps, the feed will be ranked using the samer algo applied to normal pages. The cost of the program is $8.00 per URL an $.20 per click.
When I asked them to explain how the program was different than cloaking, they were a bit lost for words... :)
That's good info.. Thanks...
It seems to me, however, that it would be much more cost effective to just cloak than to pay $.20 cents per click.
Also, thank you Marcia for the 'happy anniversary' thought. :)
That's right, the client's end site has to be submitted. We are one of five SEO companies selected for Phase 1, although they are marketing direct to individual networks.
The upside for end clients, is that sites with a database of products that are presented through dynamic HTML and CGI, will be able to be indexed in AV. Another plus, is that the XML feed will control which pages are presented for indexing. So a network that has not had AV "deep crawl" properly can take advantage of the program.
The negatives are obvious, but AV controls their index.
