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www.MYSITE.com was 40 yesterday and now is #2 for the same KW
submitted date was 1-19-01
Last modified on: 9-Jan-2001 - 13K bytes
It looks like the are using the same algo as Dec/Nov time frame with the new submmted pages listed.
Any one seeing this?
Lucky
All in all, this looks to me as if it may be some sort of database "rotation" to bring some others from the top 50 -or even deeper- up into the top 10. Based upon the ones I'm seeing returned (I have 3 in the top 20 for the same phrase), I think there's a touch of click popularity in the algo, too. I'll add that this is just based on intuition, nothing definitive.
So, you ask, why am I still unhappy to a certain extent? Because with the LookSmart title and description these sites have (from the pre paid submission period), even with top positions, these sites gets less clickthroughs than they used to...
Agreed. We've touched on that elsewhere, but it's important to note that AV isn't ringing the cash register like it used to. Until the last change, I've held one of the top 3 slots -sometimes rotating to #1- it was a yawner, almost third-tier SE traffic levels. This is not an overly obscure search either, the index page did 40,000 uniques last month -MSN and Yahoo do the lion's share of the referrals now.
If I have sinned (not that I wanted), would they delete me completely, or is this just some soft punishment?
Or is it just that AV is half dead and the Scooter is broken?
>Or is it just that AV is half dead
I vote "half dead" -googlemania is my diagnosis.
Same here.
The good news is that AV is now showing some deep pages on my site that they spidered on their own (one currently in top 10). But, if a tree falls in the woods and no one......
I had always went to great pains to keep from spamming their index, and was receiving traffic for over a year when this happened. I can't say for sure I was banned but my site traffic from AV went from several hundred visitors a day to almost zero, and an index query reported only the home page and two pages listed by DMOZ. Needless to say, I became a very unhappy camper and as a CMGI stockholder, expressed my unhappiness through other channels.
Well, as of two days ago, most of my pages are back in the index and once again drawing traffic. For how long, though, no one knows. I just hope AV finally becomes a stable and dependable search engine and that they find a way of surviving without selling their short-term souls to the likes of GoTo. I would much rather pay Alta Vista an annual subscription fee to have my commercial pages included in their index than to have them sell out to GoTo and others.
Anyway, for today, I'm happier with Alta Vista :-)
Please help me...I'd like to ride the altavista train, too. :)
Cheers,
Han Solo
I'd wait awhile. AV is quirky right now (as it has been for months). IMO, it's too unstable to assume that today's algo is going to be here tomorrow. Since November, I've gone from #2 to #1, to #3, to oblivion, back to #3, then #1, and now in the teens. All of this with no significant changes to SEO, and -from what I can tell- no real changes in my competitors' sites.
What, pray tell, was the algo of Dec/Nov that we should be looking for? Or is this temporary - me thinks so. Or at least I hope so. I see top listings for sites with hidden text or text same color as background and Keyword stuffing. Actually all the stuff we've been warned against doing. Should I assume that all of these top pages are cloaked?
That's some of it, but there's a change in the size of the db, too. The "pages found" on my SERP went from (roughly) 550k to 300k, to 360k, to 550k.
Showing your age there, mayor. Check in w/ Marcia down in "Old Hippie Central" you need some cultural reconditioning.
Back to topic:
OK, my SERP is at 570k and I'm now holding spots 7, 8, and 10. Not bad.
I highly recommend the course Marcia teaches there, Mayor.
It'll help you get back in the swing of things.
<older than dirt>
But how do I get to Marcia's "old hippie central" anyway? :)
</older than dirt>
>But how do I get to Marcia's "old hippie central" anyway?
Stand out by the curb, she'll pick you up. Look for a beat-up yellow VW van held together by bumper stickers most of them of the "Make Love, Not War" variety.
back to topic:
Out of curiousity, what are you guys seeing as the "pages found" relative to the other times the db has had a mood swing. Currently, at 571K, I believe this is the highest number I've seen to date.
I have been watching them all day and every hour or so my main site has gone form
#5 to #30 now back to #2
They are all over the place right now
Yes I think link pop is a factor
the #1 site has 950 links
#2 (my site) has 200 links
#3 only has 6 sites
So that seems to confirm link pop is a factor
but the link pop for #4 site is 28
This leads me to belive that it's not only the link pop but the qulity of it as well
The top 4 sites had text links with the "keyword" as the link (just like google PageRank).
But as i progressed throught the link pop for the top ten sites they did not have the "keyword" in the text (i.e. click here instead of keyword keyword2 keyword3)
The results with the first site had 2,246,643 pages found and now the other site's results show 5,874,735 pages found.
First site had no links pointing to the sub-page but had 31 links pointing to the root level index page.
Second site is a sub-domain with a sub-page and has no links pointing to that sub-page. There are 49 links pointing to the root-level index page.
Both pages are showing the last modified date at Jul 07 2000. The first time those pages were updated after Jul 07 was on Dec. 29.
They must be digging sites out from an old database eh?
Yes, I think we've gone back to an old database. The sites I'm now seeing on the top ten are all 'elder' sites for this SERP. This morning, and particularly yesterday, AV had picked up some newer sites of mine (different domains with many of the same keywords, each with distinct content but built on the same general theme) and put 2 in the top 20.
Lucky, it's easy to read one and think the other as they are so closely related, but I think click popularity may now be a factor as well as link popularity. I hasten to add that this is just a hunch based on what I know about the traffic -my competitors included.
hmmmm.....I have serious doubts about this, they're not using any tracking in their serps like yahoo, directhit, or looksmart. Unless it's only affecting looksmart listings in AV......
I noticed that for the past two or more weeks they have had some kind of "jump" link to all the sites in the SERP's results page. Could those have been click-pop links? Today they are missing.
Also, my other site is back up to the top. They are doing some major back and forth switching today.
I heard this once before in an other fourm someplace but like seth_wilde said I dont see a unique url on the listings so im not sure how they can track this with hidding the tracking in the url srting?
You know I got to thinking about this change and well i dont see much traffic increase.
I have a #2 position on a word that gets 12040 clicks (from SeW goto tool)
An my traffice does not even come close to that # in fact i have only had 15 visitors from AV today.
Something just dont click???
