Things definetly moved on a couple of my old sites. Unfortunatly, no new site in the index.

The number of sites linking to us has increased and the results are jumping up and down which has been pretty standard for A.V in the past couple of months.

From our end:
No submitted new domains have been included (free submission)
No new pages have been included from domains currently in the index (also been submitted)

Not sure that this is an update? :(

This no update, just a change in alogos"
I have given up on AV. I started to get a trickle of traffic after months of nothing.
To discover that I am now sitting at No1 for my Targeted keyword. No I had not just done something right an image was beside the site that I had not used since Dec last year.

>This no update, just a change in alogos"

This is an uptdate, since more pages from many sites appeared or dissapeared. I noticed this on AV.com , not sure about wich AV you are talking about.

Noticed updates in local AV too. Not just position shifts but actual page count changes.

I agree with you Mr Macguru

/Ove

At the moment, i'm seeing more than 150Million additional pages in the index than before.

What It looks like is that pages in the index have been updated. Although I'm not seeing any new pages submitted throught the ransom note.

Added: New pages on existing sites have not been found so I'm not sure where the additional pages have come from. Perhaps it is the merge of the international and US DB? Although the figure seems a bit too small.

Hi Macguru Well it would be great if they are updating the index, My results are on the .com index What I do not understand is the very old image they have used next to my listing !

My pages too are about 4-6 months old in the AV.com index (guessing from titles and description). Despite Scooter abusing my site every month.

I think we are seeing the very start of an update - some will see newer and new pages appearing now, others will have to keep fingers crossed and hope that the pages are updated soon.

Can anyone confirm this suggestion?

Hi Terrier,

I really cannot explain the old image in AV index. It is usually some 'enancement' you have to pay for. I guess they randomly selected a part of the index to make us aware that the feature exists. :-\

If this occurred without having to pay for, I guess you are better not to touch anything, and enjoy this traffic.

>Mr Macguru

Ouch! everytime someone is calling me Mr I get another gray hair! :-/

This is hard to explane but i have a site i got no traffic from AV before but yesterday i saw in my log i got pretty good traffic from there and new position but they have not updated my title, description but Macguru is right dont change anything just wait and enjoy the traffic

(macguru mr sounds better than old man:-)

/Ove

One fairly new site of mine has had a mere 6 pages in AV - these were all ransom note submissions dating back 3 or 4 months. Now I'm seeing about 5 times as many pages in. These additional pages were not submitted (i.e., they must have been picked up by spidering), and the title/descriptions are at least a month old.

I'm also seeing a new round of Scooter/Trek spidering in the last 24 hours.

One other kind of weird element - although AV did some very thorough spiderings of the site I mention above, it ignored a hundred plus pages of unique content and articles and instead listed a couple of dozen discussion forum pages with identical titles (I hadn't yet tweaked the board software when Scooter came by). Go figure...

this is definitely an update.

i've mentioned several times that a site i submitted via the ransom note back in june / july wasn't appearing in SERPs .... well now it is, and with very good ranking.

i've not had time to investigate thoroughly, but the site shows up in 12th place for the main keyword term. a copy of the site was used with the old domain name and a robots.txt file was used to block all spiders. however, scooter ignored the robots.txt file and has ranked the old domain in 6th place for the same keyword term, despite this being an exact duplicate of the first site. i have since replaced the site on the old domain with a new site.

at about the same time, i updated another site (one of my own), but didn't bother adding the new pages to AV via the ransom note. i used a robots.txt file and meta robots tag on all the old pages to prevent indexing by search engines. AV still lists most of the old ones with the old titles and descriptions, and some of the new pages have also been added.

at least, it shows that AV is updating based on spidering of existing sites without submission via the ransom note. however, it also shows that scooter has been blatantly ignoring robots.txt files and robots meta tags.

i think AV still have a lot of catching up to do with their outdated results. they also need to fix their spiders to obey the robots.txt files and robots meta tags, and to stop ripping through my server at the rate of 3 pages per second.

in case anyone is interested, the most recent 'last modified' date i found on the sites mentioned was 18th september.

If this is an 'update' then it's been fairly disappointing to us. We've been watching Scooter make thousands of calls to our server over the past little while, and so far, all we can see are exactly two references that are buried below the 200 point.

A lot of effort and patience, and not much to show for it.

Maybe the next one (whenever that will be) will show a few more listings.

codejockey, it may be disappointing, but considering that AV didn't update anything for months, it's better than nothing. AV has a LOT of catching up to do.

i'd lay my money on them going bust before they catch up. anyone taking bets round here ?

The whole landscape is changing, with more and more becoming nothing more than paid advertising, no longer search engines at all. I remember back to Alta's weekly updates and have watched their decline since the fiasco last winter.

There will be some that are on top, apparently Google for now and I suspect we'll see that continue because of their integrity. But I believe we need a few to choose from that are true search engines with decent algos. Looking at Alta Vista's related sites in a few categories impressed me; it actually seems more sophisticated that Google's, which appear largely to be mostly sites related simply by virtue of links.

I've always liked Alta Vista; it was the first search engine I used and was my long time favorite. This update may be minimal, but it's giving me some encouragement. I'm still rooting for their survival and hope they make a come-back.

Scooter showed up on my 5-week-old site yesterday for the first time. It looked at only 10 pages out of nearly 2,500, though--possibly ones that I'd submitted a while back.

>it may be disappointing, but considering that AV didn't update anything for months

Perhaps 'disappointing' was not a decent word selection on my part, but it was the only one that I could reasonably use with some comfort.

I also remember the weekly updating, and when I started around here some (mumble, cough, cough) years ago, AV as the Only One to go to for really good results. I stayed as long as I could and then went elsewhere.

But, I've been faithful to some extent, faithfully submitting new sites, etc., to AV. I was quite happy when I began seeing Scooter showing up in the log files. I even gritted my teeth when he took over 50,000 calls in six hours on our sites. I marked that one down to our contribution to reconstructing AV back to a 'decent' SE.

So, I guess I'll sit in the back row for a while and see how things shake out. Maybe it'll be worth it. Maybe not. Anything is better than what they have now, imo.

>possibly ones that I'd submitted a while back

I've got nothing concrete or even intelligent to go by, but I've got a vague suspicion that it's submitted pages that are being added.

I haven't got the exact dates handy, but some pages that were submitted at the end of September (free, not paid submit) are now in the database, though they're not coming up at all in searches yet. There might be a time lag, and if they do come up low it won't concern me, because I remember back to when it wasn't unusual for a site to start out in the 50's and move up gradually without even making changes. I never did understand their aging cycle, I just knew that it happened. It may or may not be the same thing now.

There was a nameserver problem with my site - I wouldn't remember when except that I posted about it here and I looked it up in the site search. It was the very end of June, and the whole site got bounced from AV after being in there a while with very good rankings. Nothing happened until I re-submitted not too long ago, and it's all back in there, though not in the same positions. I have no idea if the previous listings are relevant; the spiders never did stop coming, just the listings got lost.

On that site there used to be 27 pages total listed for one section which is actually separate. There are now 55 pages for the site.

I'm seeing definite changes, but haven't figured them out at all yet.

Hmm... AV still has my old site in their database despite having the new one being submitted page by page on a semi regular basis throughout a few weeks...

6 old pages from my site that has dozens (that google has all of)..

In any case they haven't indexed all of their site submissions to say the least. Or re-indexed all sites that are in their database.

Celerityfm, I agree with you - this seems to be a partial update (at least so far), that doesn't reflect either all submissions or all spidered URLs.

Currently I'm seeing upwards movement on old pages listed before the PFI programme. Nothing fancy just plain optimization and good content. Guess I'd have to check the logs to see if referreres reflect the better rankings.

Well, my site is suddenly getting hits from altavista. I've submitted the site monthly to altavista, but since the beginning of november I'm finally having some results from it.