AltaVista just did a huge update!

alot of my pages were added

[webguybri]

I just checked altavista they added dozens of my pages for free. big update.....

.....Just called my altavista ad rep, and he confirmed....said it was the first rollout of 3.

Meaning they only did 1/3 of the index. He said they will have double the size index when they are done.

[The Contractor]

Well they have included my new site but just one page. They have crawled this site pretty recently and very deeply. This is not PFI.

[NFFC]

Keep quiet guy's lets have all the traffic whilst everyone else ignores AV

I think they updated Sunday, lots of new pages added some newish sites dropped. There seems to be a pattern of new sites getting in quickly [just the index page] then getting dropped about a month later and finally coming back in with many more pages a few weeks later.

[topr8]

well looks like i've had quite a few pages included over several sites, haven't been checking recently to spot a pattern though.

but can report that they are all unpaid pages

[deejay]

wow... yep, add me to the list. 2/3 of my pages added across two sites.. not pfi.

[quiet_man]

Confirm! I've had two new sites included, but only index pages listed. Not PFI.

[Tapolyai]

hmmm... index page dropped and a sub-page included...

[heini]

AV is rolling out a new large index, according to European sources.
Abondance.com [translate.google.com] talks about 1,1 Bill. webpages, with 18 Mill french pages.

at-web.de [216.239.37.120] also reports changes in the descriptions on serps.
At a conference in Lyon AV announced several more innovations to come.

[chiyo]

Relevancy in our keyword areas seem to have improved greatly. Starting to look very good. Good work AV.

[angiolo]

Excellent update!

I am still ranking fine; additional pages included; some competitors vanished!

[backus]

I told you! AV will be back with a vengance!

[vitaplease]

I told you! AV will be back with a vengance!

Google is getting rather reasured though..

check any search on google.com and look at the link to Altavista on the bottom of the SERP ;).

[chris_f]

I told you! AV will be back with a vengance!

Backus, I think I won the award for strongest believer in AV coming back. My predict still has one month on it.

[Grumpus]

I had only my main page on AV for a while (and zero hits from it). During the Google Crawl early this month, I submitted 4 "deep" pages just for kicks in hopes that maybe AV would manage to come sometime in the next month or six and maybe add them. Lo and behold, an AV bot showed up 10 minutes (yes, 10 minutes) later and did a pretty deep crawl (not as deep as google does) probably 300-400 pages.

I'm still not showing up in the search results - and all the sites that link to mine are still showing up HIGHER in the rankings than my front page that has been in the index for ages, but this thread has me hopeful!

G.

[Jill]

Still haven't added our site back in. Still haven't heard from them in regards to our inquiries. Anyone have a better email address to contact them with?

I am still finding that many of the results we're getting for certain kw searches are coming up with very non-relevant returns. I guess that's nothing new though.

[adamxcl]

I have to say that I had given up on AltaVista but this update does seem to be impressive. It helps that my site is listed well but I'm impressed with the relevancy on a few searches I did....seemed almost better than Google in a couple ways. But they still have a ways to go.

I did notice an uptick in traffic recently. It has gone up about tenfold this week. Perhaps they realize that if they can go back to indexing and not worry about submission fees, they could one day provide results for a big portal, like Google does.

[Robert Charlton]

In a very competitive area, I'm seeing a lot pretty questionable results... a bunch of tacky sites all clearly from the same source. These sites aren't showing up at all on Google, Fast, Inktomi, or Teoma. They look like they cost 25-cents to build... they're not linked well, and I'm guessing they're cloaked, but I haven't really checked them carefully. So, I'm not fully impressed... but there are a lot of them.

[vitaplease]

[internet-magazine.com...]

another article also mentioning the new news feature.

[keyplyr]

Alta Vista doesn't update, it rotates.

In a few weeks, it will do it again, eventually coming full circle.

[JamesR]

very nice, themes seem to be in full force.

[Napoleon]

Well... I have to be honest... even though I don't rank wonderfully myself, with my standard series of checks AV looks VERY good.

This has been a trend for some time and it continues. What a shame they took their eyes off the ball 2-3 years ago, because IMHO they deserve a much bigger market share than they currently have. Perhaps, strategically, they should look at the Ink or FAST models, because their underlying returns would surely put them in a decent position.

Nostalgically of course I would love AV back in the leading pack, but they really have made great strides forward in the last 6 months and the most recent update confirms this.

[Brad]

I just ran some of my standard test searches. Without going into a lot of depth, it looks pretty good.

AV seems to fluxuate and always seems very unstable to me, but this is looking very good. It looks like they are continuing to improve. I hope they can stay in the game.

[Camster]

We went from 20 PFI pages to 450 free (still only about 1/3 of our pages though). Now let's see what that does traffic-wise...

[Crazy_Fool]

has altavista changed it's algo with this "update"? a site that was ranking top (also top in fast, 2nd in google, top in inktomi) is now shown in 19th place. the site hasn't changed for 3 months.

the site was a free listing, as are most of the others. there are paid listings from competitors ranking below this site.

still ... it won't make a lot of difference ... top ranking still only brought 3 or 4 visitors a month compared to over 2000 from 2nd place in google (not including yahoogle etc).