Altavista.de and Altavista.com

Different Databases, yes - but where to submit?

[oLeon]

Try two searches, one in AV.com (all languages), and one in AV.de (Suchen in: Deutschland).
These are almost the same except of two (the listing is a bit different, but all pages appeare nearby compared the two resultpages): the 2nd from on AV.com -www.fadata.de- is not within the results on AV.de, though this page has been submitted with a paid express-submit.

The question why this pages is not in the german results has been answered by AV:
*****
Express Inclusion submissions are added to AltaVista's global web index. AltaVista has not yet released a program providing rapid inclusion and frequent refresh for specific regional/country searches. AltaVista International sites provide radio buttons which allow end users to search either regional or worldwide content. URLs submitted through this program are accessible when the worldwide option is chosen, in addition to all queries on www.AltaVista.com. infoSpider is not currently associated with any AltaVista program that provides inclusion for regional content to AltaVista regional international sites
*****

Okay, itīs sure that AV uses different databases. But where shall I submit if I have a page within the Com-index but not in the De-index?
The page appeares only in the global search.

[rencke]

How nice of them. The default search for all national AltaVistas is the local country and "all languages" (same as for most other international engines). There is no way for you to submit to the local index, only to the worldwide index. Those in there are the ones who submitted before they changed the rules. And the worldwide index will not be shown unless the surfers are kind enough to click the "Worldwide" radio button.

Sounds like Catch 22 to me.

My best idea: Get hold of 100 million DEM. Launch a campaign throughout Germany "When searching in AltaVista, make sure to click 'Weltweit' search". Newspapers, magazines, TV. That should do it.

Any better ideas, anyone?

[Eric_Jarvis]

yep...we could always ALL demand that altavista pull our sites from the database...if enough people did that it might hasten their demise a little

[msgraph]

If you have a site that is currently indexed in the .DE ONLY database try adding a few links in there to the others sites you would like to see in that DB.

Back when each country-specific AV had a submit page I went ahead and submitted a few domains out to all of them. Now I have a lot of other sites that are getting a few sparse hits here and there from AV.no, AV.pt, AV.de, AV.kr, etc. The only way those sites could have been listed in those DB's is from links that were pointed to them by the submitted sites.

Unless someone else submitted them and I wasn't aware of it.

Or unless AV did some kind of DB mix-up and added my sites by mistake.

Anyhow, give it a shot and maybe it'll work.

[heini]

I gave up on this. When the submit option on AV.de turned international, AV.de threw out half of my pages. They are still listed in AV.com and of course accesable via worldwide search option.
All our guesses about AV merging all dbs into one turned out to be wrong. So now we have a situation, where you have a AV.de db, to which there is no submit option. Lots of german pages are only found via AV.com.
The way AV is doing business, feeding searchers and webmasters with crap, is getting ridiculous.

[oLeon]

I guess thereīll start a paid-submission for the regional indexes. Itīs the only reason why you canīt submit a page to the local db right now.

Like discussed here:
[webmasterworld.com...]
and to read her:
[altavista.com...]

[rencke]

I think you are right. This whole thing is so bizarre, that this simply has to be the reason.

[rencke]

Just got this in the mail from Kees, a Dutch SEO professional who tried to register as member this afternoon, but without success:

The AV Europe database is still active for all AltaVista's portals in Europe. However since 3 months they've deactivated all EU-spiders - direct submissions from european portals result in submission to the .com database.

Our contacts at AV Europe have gone for AltaVista is closing a lot of their european offices - at the UK-office no answers are given. My idea is that they're going to use the .com database for the european portals too - in time.

- Kees