Altavista express inclusion - worth the money?

[scorpion]

is the express inclusion worth it? It's a bit more expensive than inktomi and others. Thanks.

[jeremy goodrich]

Never tried it, I've gotten so little traffic from them (ranking well) that it just doesn't make sense to me to pay for it - however, your milage may vary.

Who knows? Maybe AV will make a comeback. At this point in time, though, I'd say submit by hand - see how you rank - if you can't or don't, then perhaps give the PFI a whirl.

Most of the reviews of it I've read here indicate it's a 'waste of money'...

[rcjordan]

At this point in time, though, I'd say submit by hand - see how you rank - if you can't or don't, then skip it.

[tedster]

In terms of inclusion, AV is finding my new sites and new pages quite well on its own - it just takes a link or two from another site that they already spider.

Even more, these new pages are getting decent ranking. But as others here have said, the traffic they send is a pale shadow of what I remember from a few years ago. You can afford to place AV issues on the back-burner for now, I'd say.

Nurse them along in your spare time, just in case they find a magic spell that puts them back on the path to traffic. But don't focus there at present - you'll probably get very little return on your efforts.

[ulstrup]

It's not worth it.

Got top posititions on quite competitive keywords, one or two referrers a week, nobody uses AV today... that might chance, AV is quite good at making an ampression on "something is on it's way"...

And yes, I did pay - money on experience...

[jambad]

We have recommended AV and Ink paid inclusions for our clients, but in researching we see little evidence that our paid pages are performing any better than the pages that are naturally crawled.

[tedster]

Right - the only thing you can count on is they will be crawled more often - which would make a difference if there were lots of traffic to be had at the top positions. Then the time spent tweaking a page would bring a return. Right now it doesn't for me.

[Brett_Tabke]

Kinda sad that according to Alexa, AV has fallen out of the top 100 traffic sites. I wonder if yahoo will buy them too?

I think the lesson to be learned from Alta, is don't lose the webmasters.

[gsx]

"little evidence that our paid pages are performing any better than the pages that are naturally crawled."

Which is exactly what PFI (Pay for Inclusion) is. You paid to be included. And unless you broke any serious rules or because of technical difficulties, your pages will be included. And they will be updated. Regularly.

Other than that, there is no difference. You do not get higher in the results and you do not get any placement guarantees.

[Thanasus]

AV is dead. I wouldn't pay them five cents for inclusion. Quite honestly, I don't even bother anymore with manual submissions to them. It just isn't worth it. I tried it for 3 months this year and saw virtually no traffic. My time is better spent developing content or optimizing for google

[Brett_Tabke]

Hey, they are ripe for a takeover and it's no secret offers are being entertained. MSN did have a good working relationship with Alta and compaq at one point.

[ulstrup]

Hey, they are ripe for a takeover and it's no secret offers are being entertained. MSN did have a good working relationship with Alta and compaq at one point.

With Yahoo taking over Ink, that makes sense...

[ikbenhet1]

i have to but in here.

Few months ago i tried the AV express inclusion thrugh webwurld. I used 1 domain(which is a frameset), then submitted to 3 AV indexes(the global, nl , be).

NONE my sites were even indexed in Av.

Now i look at the index and it seems AV Crawled all the links on the site i submitted with express inclusion, which happened to be my own sites(good for me).

But, then i also noticed these sites only show up for the indexes i paid for.

So when i search in .nl .be or .com i see my sites. When i check the others domains like .DE no sign of'm.

I submitted to the DE index few days ago, i expect the same results.

o yeah, i only have to pay 16Eur extra for the german index. it's weird, i paid 80 bucks a piece for .nl .de & .com and now they only want 16 bucks for the german index.
don't even know why?

added --> ow yeah, the ranking are terrific. lotta important #1's.