Is altavista in the game anymore?

[ByronM]

Is PFI worth it on AV.com nowadays?

I'm looking to expand into other search engines but i can submit to fast and inktomi together for the same price of PFI for av.

Some of my urls are already in INK for free but never seen anything from AV. Never even seen the AV bot.

[engine]

Scooter's still around and it came through only yesterday.

Is it in the game? Well, unfortunately, you'll only really know for your site when you've got some pages in there.

I'm still seeing referrals, although they are considerably down on what AV used to be before it went through its self-destruct mode some time back. It's never really recovered. I wish it had as it was a good resource.

[steveb]

Scooter is the second best crawler so far as I'm concerned... active, comes regular, takes the sensible pages to take.

[martinibuster]

Around 2% of referrals coming from AV. Compare that to AskJeeves' 2.3-3% market share. AJ gets a lot of attention but AV deserves more, imo, because of it's better technology.

[Bobby_Davro]

Scooter really gets shifting on some sites; nearly as good as Googlebot, and miles better than Inktomi and Fast.

However, it can take a while for it to arrive in the first place in my experience.

As for traffic.. I don't see a great deal. Still, at least they have the service there in the first place to attract new users.

[jk3210]

Not in my case.

Google....... 62%
Yahoo........ 22%
Alta Vista.. 0.65%

They used to be my favorite SE, too.

[sidyadav]

Yes, AV does visit frequently, but people say, the AV database size is hardly upto 700 million. That may be one of AV's concerns - to expand its index.

As for the crawling quality - I've never seen Scooter dis-obey robots.txt, or visit more than 10 pages every minute..you know, the normal everyday Googlebot stuff?

Sid

[Mohamed_E]

AltaWho?

Google ..... 62%
Yahoo ...... 19%
AltaVista ... 0.39%

[skibum]

IMO, Ink is the only engine worth doing PFI on if you are paying by the page for inclusion. If you do a Trusted Feed program then you midas well send the feed to all the engines assuming you are going through PT of some other reseller.

[ByronM]

Thanks for all the feedbak. I think i'll save my money and wait for natural spidering as the site gets deeper into the other engines.

I used to preech AV as the best engine, but now that i think a bout that, that was almost 7 years ago before compaq bought up and ruined the alpha line that AV was a showcase of.

[kevinpate]

though seldom used from what I can tell, av is still a good engine. I define good very simply:
low effort + relevant serps = good.

[afterburner]

I have seen an increase in my log files for Altavista over the last two weeks.

[jetboy_70]

My music/entertainment site has had 10%+ of its search engine referrals from AV for over a year now. It's way behind MSN/Yahoo!/Google but about everything else.

A big travel industry site just manages 1.6% from AV.

It depends a lot on your industry and how prone the SERPs are to spamming in that particular sector.

I agree with those who think that AV is undervalued.