Getting nowhere with Altavista

despite paying

[allybongo]

In May I submitted 10 pages of a site to Altavista using their paid listing. For some reason we are not ranking at all for any of the keywords despite being ranked very highly on other search engines. I checked that the pages were indexed by AV and they are.

I've read through other threads in this forum and it seems I'm doing everything I should be.

Any ideas?

[highman]

IMO its a time thing, new pages / sites seem to climb up towards the top over a few months, this has been the case with 4 of our last sites

[allybongo]

I don't think we've ever come up for any of our keywords on AV and when I check the source code for the sites that do come up top I have no idea why! Loads of repetitive keywords and one only had 3 words in the body copy.

Its complete madness!

[allybongo]

Bit of a light switched on in my head! We are only not ranking when the keywords are just typed in! If we add + inbetween all the words or put them in quotes we are no. 1!

[rogerd]

In that case, ally, you may need to do a bit more optimization and/or let the pages age a bit. Personally, I wouldn't spend gobs of time on AV - I've got some great rankings that deliver pitiful traffic. If you have fairly specialized keywords, your referrals are likely to be very low even if you rank well.