Paid submission to AV - how was it for you?

[engine]

How is your paid submission going with AV?
Are you seeing your site appearing in the index quickly and have you been able to re-position it if you are dissatified with the ranking?

[zechariah]

Hmm,I too don't know haven't tried their pay per inclusion method -- I would sure like someone to let me know their results too.Engine did you try it & are waiting for the results to show?

[engine]

Hi Zechariah,
I've not paid, but, I'm intruigued to know how it's gone for those that have paid.

Is it a good solution?

[agerhart]

I paid for a site that is two months old that gets decent ranking. The site was indexed fairly quickly......I have not tried to make any changes yet though.

[skibum]

We submitted several pages from one site. We get email from AV whenever they come around to update and the pages are in there. Haven't looked at the traffic, but expect that's its very minimal.

[minnapple]

Been playing with an Alta inclusion page for three months now. Results have been dismal.

Same keyword/s using the Ink inclusion have done much better.

Alta has to many 404 pages above my listing and alot of junk that has little to do with my targeted terms. Even a few "Coming Soon" sites.

I don't mind competition above me but the stuff I see is dudu. I have stopped wasting my time and money on Alta inclusion.

[engine]

As I mentioned in another thread, I'd invite and AltaVista representative to contribute to our discussion.

[AltaVista Rep]

Thanks for the invite to join in the conversation.

I look forward to answering any questions regaring our new inclusion programs.

AltaVista Rep

[Rumbas]

Hi Altavista_Rep. Welcome to the forums - very nice of you to drop by :)

I'll go right ahead.

A lot of our members have seen massive spidering from Altavista lately, but is seems that many new pages are not added to your index. Some reports of new pages getting in just fine though.

Could you maybe elaborate a bit about this?

[Crazy_Fool]

Most of the sites I look after get very good rankings in Google and other engines, and plenty of visitors from those engines. Every site I've submitted to AV via the ransom note gets spidered but never shows up in the search results.

If AV won't even show these sites in search results, then what's the point of paying them to not show them ?

As minnapple says, there is a lot of junk in AV search results - this must be very offputting for users who just want to find stuff. This can only drive AV users away - why would anyone struggle to find a relevant website from an AV search when they can get what they want in a split second from Google ?

I think if AV are trying to force people to pay for inclusion by not showing sites submitted via the ransom note, then they are committing corporate suicide. Not everyone wants to pay. AV users are already having a tough time trying to find relevant sites from searches, and if new sites are not added then this can only make the situation worse for the searchers.

[Liane]

I have a site in Alta Vists which shows up in the top two for a few very targeted search phrase. This phrase drives excellent traffic from Google, MSN and AOL ... but I haven't had even one inquiry from Alta Vista. Why would I pay for zero return on ivestment even when raking one or two on targeted phrases?

[jeremy goodrich]

Hi, Altavista_rep.

Recently, I started banning your spider from my site in my .htaccess file. The site in question is in my profile, and the excessive spidering, while not necessarily something I liked, was okay, as long as there was a reason...

However, in the 3 months that your bot spidered my site completely more than 4 times, which is about every 3 weeks, not one single page has been added to your datbase. So, I've been giving it the 403 access denied.

What I want to know, same as everybody else, is is this your way of forcing sites/webmasters/and marketers to pay for your paid spidering program?

If it is, then I'm going to continue banning your engine. After all, many engines have a datase size in excess of a billion pages fully indexed and last I checked, your engine is running a tad behind on that. So, if you want content to add, great! I fully support your engine in it's quest to regain some of it's lost fans (I'm one of them).

But, if your program of pay or else is all that will get my site indexed, no thanks. I provide valuable, free information on my site, and don't care to pay to get it exposed to the audience that craves such info. It has that already. Without documents, sites, and publishers, your engine would not be where it is today...and if you only index paid pages, you risk losing a great many publishers.

Thanks for stopping by, and I think my questions are the same as many here: is altavista still indexing new stuff, or do I have to pay you?

I look forward to with great anticipation what words you might have for us webmasters and publishers.

[Crazy_Fool]

I just went on AV and it looks .... bare .... empty .... where have all the advertisements gone ??? have the advertisers pulled out ? maybe they've finally realised that nobody uses AV any more because the search results are crap ?

[ulstrup]

In my browser, it looks like the ad-delivery has trouble, not an AV thing.

Welcome Altavista_Rep !

I hope you and the AV team will take this constructive critisism serious. Most of us deal with SE's and SEO for a living, and the results of AV are - sorry - very bad.

What are your plans to stay alive - pay for spidering is a solution, but you need to clean up your database, update your web index and provide useful searchresults. Pay for spidering means pay for relevant traffic, and AV delivers close to nothing.

Nice to have a dialogue for the benefit of AV, SEO and users.

[Crazy_Fool]

I've got to add here, that paid listings are only viable for business sites (and then only if the site is going to get visitors from the search engines). If AV is refusing to list submissions via the ransom note as a means of forcing people to pay for listings, then that means a lot of legitimate sites simply won't get listed at all.

And if AV IS trying to force people to pay for submissions, then I'd go as far as to say they are committing corporate suicide.

[whereami]

Excuse my cynical nature, but I doubt the authenticity of an AltaVista Rep with a hotmail email address who spells reguarding "regaring". Hotmail is MSN, their competitor: ...hello?!

I've visited the AV inclusion help chat room a few afternoons and got many answers. Live people answered as I asked!

minnapple, If I had 404 pages ranking better than my results, I'd get AV to remove them by submitting those dead links myself.

[minnapple]

> minnapple, If I had 404 pages ranking better than my results, I'd get AV to remove them by submitting those dead links myself.

It's their database, they can clean it up on their own time. Why should I pay for inclusion then need to clean up their mess?

If they don't care about their database I don't care about their database.

[whereami]

I'm just saying if you care to raise your rank above the dead clutter, spend a second, not a dime, by using the ranson note free-way. It could clear up your path to higher listings sooner than waiting for AltaVista to find and remove them out of your way.

[mayor]

I'd try the Alta Vista paid inclusion if I thought I would get traffic.

Alta Vista trashed my site about a year ago, for reasons unknown, so I gave up on them.

As far as my site records go, Alta Vista has been dead for a year, so my advertising dollars are being spent elsewhere.

If they would re-instate my site and update their index for it to show me they can still generate traffic I would re-consider spending money on them.

[engine]

AltaVista_Rep
Can you contact me via e-mail or StickyMail to establish how best to ask and answer the questions in this thread?

Thanks.

[WebGuerrilla]

>>I doubt the authenticity of an AltaVista Rep with a hotmail email address who spells reguarding "regaring".

The last time I checked, it was spelled "regarding" not "reguarding" (At least here in the US where AltaVista_Rep is from) so I don't think that has much to do with whether or not he/she is authentic.

Just a missed key. If we start using spelling (especially in a forum with no spellcheck) to determine how legit members may or may not be, we'll be in big trouble. :)

[Brett_Tabke]

Connecting from an AV ip anyway. In the past, we've had AV reps signup with alternative email addresses. The techs I talked to didn't want to expose their av email address to email harvesters.

[rogerd]

>>didn't want to expose their av email address to email harvesters<<

Or even to pesky SEOs whose pages aren't getting indexed... :)