Zip2 Altavista

[msgraph]

For the first time in a while, I just submitted to Altavista Italy and Altavista Australia using the submission form on both sites.

Right afterwards I looked in the log files and noticed that after both submissions I received a "Zip2" robot.

Is this the robot for all Altavista submissions outside of the US version?

I did a few other trials and saw that they also use a different C-Block IP address each time.

i.e.

212.187.227.70
212.187.227.50
212.187.227.69
212.187.227.49

Have they been doing this for some time?

[engine]

msgraph, I'm confused by this as I thought that ZIP2 used to be an AV SE and was sold off. See here. [zip2.com]
I crack a few of the troops heads together around here for some ideas.

[msgraph]

Submit to any Outside US Altavista site and you will see a Zip2 spider grab your page. Just the index not the robots.txt.

Try this one [au.altavista.com]

Check your logs right after.

[msgraph]

And it really seems to work. I submitted to Altavista Italy on Jan. 08 and they posted my site on Jan. 10 in the Italian section.

No matter what country specific AV you submit to, the spiders all come from the same server. I'm really starting to finally see some worldwide hits these days from Altavista.

If they sold off Zip2.com maybe they haven't gotten around to renaming their spider yet

[engine]

Oh yes, so it did. Also got this 212.187.227.50 pointing back to the UK. Very strange.

[msgraph]

I've also caught this Mercator snooping around on some index and sub-pages across many domains.

UA: Mercator-1.1
IP: 212.187.226.112
DNS: ukaddurlr.aveurope.co.uk

I wonder if this is the spider that populates AV UK and/or the AV worldwide database. Deep-crawler maybe?

I really wish more people would contribute their ideas to this other section of AV outside of the U.S. It is really starting to show some true promise, more than it has in the past. If you get listed well you can almost draw in about 50% - 75% of what you would get if you were listed the same as the US version. It's very very SEO friendly, unlike it's big brother.

[engine]

Since AV setup in the uk, spidering and listing has been relatively easy as they wanted to build a good db. In addition, with a relatively small and geographically specific site, it is easier to get good rankings. Let's face it, if the db has a quarter of the main site then you're only competing with a quarter of the competitive listings.

I agree, more input would help. I'll try a rallying call.

[makemetop]

If it helps, I've had very comprehensive crawls from two Mercator 1.1 spiders this month.

On the first scooter.aveurope.co.uk taking everything (including image files).

Then every day for 3 days scooterr.aveurope.co.uk - deep crawl each time.

As AV UK spiders so deeply, I have not submitted any pages to them directly since August. I just make sure links point to what I want in and let Scooter take it's course. I am a big supporter of AV UK and get significant traffic from it.

[msgraph]

Does anyone know how old this UA is from Altavista's UK submit page?

Java1.2.2-4

[msgraph]

Now I am getting a different one....

Java1.2.2-4-beta1

Will they make up their mind?

[Fusioneer]

Submit to AV Australia and you will get the Zip2 spider almost immediately. Not sure how long before you appear in the listings however, seems to vary enormously with regional versions of AV.

- Fusioneer