Odd AV Listings

What's up with this??

[jilly]

For one of our mains sites we just lost at least half of all our listings with AV. Some of these have been in the database for literally years! Some were fairly new. We do not spam and the actual domains are in tact so this is not the case. For one site inparticular all of the listings that are left, 29 of them, are dated 10/31/2000. Trick or treat, I'd say trick.

How strange is this? Is anyone else seeing this or are we just special?

Jill

[eljefe3]

Jilly,

I had this happen also just recently. I emailed AV and asked for an explanation. They didn't give one only showed me where they resubmitted the page for indexing. Now a few weeks later, it's still not in there. Something is going on with all these strange new spiders that are coming from the various scooters and av mercators.

Write to them and see what they say (if anything).

[DaveAtIFG]

Many of mine were also dropped several weeks ago. It appears to me they haven't indexed new submissions for quite a while. Indications are that they're again starting to index. You may find this [altavista.advalvas.be] useful, it gives date indexed and a ranking score...

[eljefe3]

DAve,

Nice find there. I've searched high and low through their site to find out where to ask them (if they'll tell) how they get this ranking system. They have a help page but no email address( If you have questions that are not dealt with here, then please send these questions to Belgium Ad ValvasŪ). If anyone sees this, can you please post as I'd like to make a few inquiries which might shed some light on the AV scoring system (worth a shot).

[jilly]

Thanks Dave. I searched for that banned domain and there are listings referring to it, although nothing from that domain. Funny thing is the listings that have that domain in their information do not belong to me and are just using my domain as a "link" on their sites. Lovely.

Jill

[kcbuckshot]

great tool Dave. Anyone know how they arrive at their "total score"?

[jilly]

And better yet, what the score actually stands for?

[The Yellow Brand]

That's an interesting tool. I took a quick peek at it, and here's what I think.

- The rankings seem to relate to how common the keyword is. For example, the top ranker for 'homepage' had around 6000 points. The top ranker for 'email' had 330 points and 'links' 323 points. 'through' hit the bottom with just 209 points.

On the other hand, the top ranker for 'oxymoron' had around 18000 points while the top ranker for 'pokemon' had 26000 points, even while 'pokemon' is far more common than 'oxymoron'.

- When searching for 'link:url', all links seem to have a value of 1.

I'm too tired to examine this further right now, but hopefully someone else can find something meaningful.

[seth_wilde]

The score is AV's relevancy ranking. It is determined by how common the phrase is and how well it fits AV's algo. The more common the phrase the smaller the number, but you'll see variation due to how competitive(well optimized)the search phrase is.

[jilly]

Thanks, seth, that helps a lot! I learn something new here every day.

Jill (struggling but hangin' tough!)

[jilly]

After checking stats again today it seems that Altavista is reducing our listings to only one per domain, that being the root domain. This includes sites that are on sub domains being booted for no apparent reason. I know I have been out of the loop recently, but this seems a bit extreme since most of these pages and sites listed had been there for a long time. Can someone tell me what's going on?

Jill

[budterm]

Hi Jill,

Yes, that happened to us last June: all pages consolidated to only one listing per domain. Took away a lot of good rankings too...

Terry

[jilly]

Terry:

Did you resubmit your sites? If you did, what happened?

Jill

[budterm]

Jill, actually no, I did not resubmit the sites. I read about some other people experiencing the same thing at the time and figured it was happening to all. I didnt lose any of the root domains, just the pages within the domains.