Link Checking Tip for Altavista

[msgraph]

In case anyone hasn't found this out, here is a better way to check how many links in Altavista's database are pointing to your site.

I did a check on the regular section, www.altavista.com, and only had 288 sites/pages point to one of my sites.

Then I did a check in listings.altavista.com and 78,000 sites/pages were listed in the results. This is the number I expected and after drilling through some of the results I found it to be true.

site: listings.altavista.com
search parameter: link:domainname

I imagine that Altavista keeps a small database for their www.altavista.com results to save time and space while offering a larger one for more in depth searches.

[Machiavelli]

Where did you find out about listings.altavista.com?

[msgraph]

A bunch of my sites have been getting hits from this part of Altavista. But when I tried to do a search on the regular Altavista with a keyword phrase I couldn't find my site. When I did the same search in listings.altavista.com I saw the site. The results in this database are different than that from just the regular www.altavista.com section.

If you do use the same keyword search phrase you should get different results.

[grnidone]

An excellent tip! Thanks.
-G

[Machiavelli]

Thinking about it, this seems to redirect to the site mention in this [webmasterworld.com] thread - ie when they were showing Goto results in green. So this must be the site where all the junk they have found is kept, and as you say, they whittle it down to the junk, I mean, ultra-relevant results that they show at www.

[JamesR]

also try partners.altavista.com , news dates are older but content is newer and is a better database for relevancy on the terms I monitor.

[msgraph]

uk.altavista.com has the same match up of results as listings.altavista.com. I guess all the other Altavista sites(worldwide) are the same except for the main www. one.

It looks like listings.altavista.com's(and all the others) index is more SEO friendly than the main site. You'll get some really good hits if you list well in this database.

[Woz]

Hmmm...

listings.altavista.com redirects to
[tools.altavista.com...]

is this the same page??

Onya
Woz

[JonB]

I was redirected too but when you do a search on anything it will redirect you back to listings.altavista.com

Jon

[Woz]

Ahhhh...

<dissapears to polish spectacles>

Onya
Woz