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22 months ago we purchased the contents of an 850 page site, but could then not afford the attractive domain name. Contents were moved into a directory in an existing site and duly submitted everywhere, including Altavista. The seller had agreed to redirect the domain to where the contents were, until a buyer could be found for the old domain. A few months later the old domain was dropped from Altavista as expected and the pages appeared under their new home with the best ranking in the 20ies.
The seller never managed to sell the domain and we picked it up very recently at a price we could afford, but have done nothing about the redirect. It is still there.
Suddenly, this url ranks as #4 in altavista.com for a single word search that gives over 2 million hits. The redirect works, so that is not the problem. But if you click "more pages from this site" the result will be 180 pages with adresses that have not existed since the summer of 1999. And the strangest thing of all: Title and description has been taken from the index page of the new address, but is shown for the old one. So they must have disregarded the redirect. Can anyone figure this out?
The only logical explanation I can think of is that linking has suddenly become a major factor for AV - the redirecting url has more than 1700 links pointing to it. But the 180 pages - that's weird.
I am wondering what to do. Obviusly no one in his right mind so much as breathes when he's got a #4 spot for a competitive keyword. But dare I leave things as they are?
I think they might be juggling, tuggling, flipping, and redoing, refining, refinishing, and then doing it again..... their database/databases.
Hopefully, things will pan out pretty soon.
It is a major factor for I've recently seen pages of mine listed that could only have been listed because of links. If they follow through with their claim on matching up links with the content of a site, then I guess it's just a matter of time until they find and drop your redirect.
If Altavista is doing anything like Google then you are in luck as long as those links still exist. I contacted Google several times about seeing 404 error listings on a few SERP's. They said those 404 pages will not be removed from the index until the people who are linking to those pages correct their links.
They used my Looksmart directory listing but used my actual page title and meta tag description with a search result. This was yesterday.
I do know that link pop is becoming important with them now But the weird results is kinda scary.
Also had a listing for a page with a title that has to be about 1 1/2 years old. The description was right but the title was very strange.
Deep linking is an interesting theory. I have lots of that. But they will have to wait forever, people rarely update their links. Hope you are right, msgraph because I don't share ihelpyou's hope that "things will pan out". Not with a site in the #4 position of 2,1 million possible.
Mind you, the site was dropped once and has been taken back very recently. And they seem to have followed the redirect to pick up title and description for the real page.
For all the other pages shown under "More pages from this site" AV is showing exactly the same date and size which is completely impossible, since the directory structure was moved around quite a bit during the move and those pages were definitely not available to their spider on or after the date shown. That is just incredible.
