Big changes at AV

[Air_]

I heard a rumour from someone attenting the Internet World conference that AV will make some unprecedented algorithm changes to be effective in two to three weeks which will piss off a huge number of webmasters and make the "problems" of late look like a walk in the park. Anyone heard anything ??

Will let you know if I dig up more .......

[Brett_Tabke]

Hey Air, how goes it?

That sounds very similar to what I'd been hearing about Inktomi for the past couple of months. This last monday Ink switched their algos dramatically kicking in phase two of the Theme engine switchover. Not a blip has been heard. Results were shaken up a bit, but nothing to radical. Maybe it just hasn't filtered down yet. Is the person sure they didn't get the Ink and Alta story confused?

[Air_]

Hey Brett,

things are cool, u?

This person says they got inside info from someone high up at AV, won't reveal a thing but says by next week he'll be able to share the info. Maybe nothing we don't already know, I'll let you know when I hear. Hmmm ......

[seth_wilde]

I believe this is what air was referring to, the SEF's yanked all the links to this, but I was able to find it in another forum.

[submitexpress.com...]

they talk about using 5 primary sources for AV's algo

- Link Popularity
- Click Popularity
- Ownership of Domain
- Content
- Term Vector

If this soucre is good than AV will be using the "facts about:" information that they gather from iatlas along with click popularity as features in the new Algo.

The article also talks about "Term Vector" which they don't give any information on, but appears to be "theme" based indexing, which should already be known by most people around here (thanks to Brett=)

[Air_]

Yeah that's the one ....

AV is just going to keep making up rules until they figure out what it is they really want to do I think, they are perilously close to really making a mess of themselves!!

[Brett_Tabke]

Like most of the speculation from unknown sources, I am going to wait until I see's it to believes it, lol.

Old Altavista really has them stirred up though eh? I've never seen anything that has gotten people so worked up.

[Air_]

Yeah, it's getting to be almost funny, the only thing I've seen come close to getting people this worked up is the ODP ...

[Brett_Tabke]

After hearing about it after the fact, I was sorry I didn't get a chance to see what that was all about. Jim/Janet has it all deleted now.

[Pete]

I am pretty apprehensive about this next change. Normally I dont place to much emphasis on the next move unless the source is creditable , but I am getting paranoid. A.V recently has been a saviour for our sites and is generating most of our traffic.

What was the deal with the ODP? Missed it at SEF as well.

Anyway, uploading my first "theme" optimized site today. Really interested to see how things turn out.

Pete

[seth_wilde]

Brett you can still see the edited version, it's under "New Av Ranking Algorithms" Danny Sullivan even makes a guest appearance and tells people not to worry about themes.

I'm waiting for AV to cause webmasters to start jumping out windows like the stockbrokers in the 20's

[Brett_Tabke]

We were talking about the long ODP saga - about 10 posts that boiled into a flame war over there.

Ya, that thread you mentioned has also been edited to death. absurd.

[rcjordan]

RE ODP flame war... it must've been pretty bad. I received my first-ever admin-locked topic anywhere after I posted a 'yahoo vs odp' thread without knowing much about the flame war, except that Jim had a front page message that the ODP forum was closed. Sadly, I had missed the war itself. An email filled me in later, saying the problem had been with ODP editors that were members of the forum --no further explaination, though.

Brett, I think I read Danny's "don't worry about themes" message, but that was before I had come across your posting in SEF on the topic. I expect you've seen my reply there related to a site I have that just happens to fit a theme-friendly model. I've been working AV since it came out, and know it pretty well. I'm seeing evidence in my own site that runs counter to Danny's message. What say ye on themes and AV?

[Brett_Tabke]

Themes and AV. Working big time. The problem I've had is knowing for certain just what is all going into the algo/success because we started a few months ago on fresh domains. We went from day one with straight themes. We did 100-120(somewhere in that range) pages of content directly at 8 keywords. They were quality pages moved from other domains.

We started submitting 10 pages at a time and letting them get indexed and have slowly moved up the ladder trying to figure out where AV is going to drop pages at. So far in two months we've put 75 of those pages into av and are drawing straight from the 8 keywords. And now that some link popularity is figuring in on those domains, it is getting difficult to say for proof positive what is causing the success. Each domain has hit top ten atleast once and others are in the page 2-3 range consistantly.

I'm trying to resist playing too much since those are pretty competitive categories. For now, we are just leaving them alone aside from a couple submissions a week. I think it is important to do atleast a couple submissions from the same domain per week. Seems like AV gives you a 'freshness' boost if it finds new pages on your site.

[Brett_Tabke]

Saturdays update, as Garrett Moris of saturday night live fame used to say, been berry berry good to me