site map

How does Alta Vista feel about site maps??

[cyberbear]

Hi Brett

I have 2 site maps that are doing well. Would Alta vista consider them spam and ban my site? Here is the one from the domain that AV hasnt banned. [ecommerce-packages.com...]

[Brett_Tabke]

They will follow links on the map. (still a good idea).

I'm thinking a directory style sitemap will do the most good. You need some text to go with the links - so a one sentence description of each page will do the most good.

[cyberbear]

Brett

Thats exactly what I did with my site maps, put a line of text explaining each link and sneaking in some additional key words.It is ranking very well on Inktomi on dozens of keyword phrases. I will keep you informed how it does on Alta Vista and the other engines.

[Brett_Tabke]

I would certainly be interested in how this comes out. It should work well for Alta.

[chiyo]

Have to back up the comment re site maps.

Our AV hits decreased markedly since we introduced a javascript menu on the top of every page, at the same time as our Google hits soared.

We decided however to leave the menu off one page, call it a text only menu page, and just listed links to the most popular pages and section indexes with short one line descriptions (with attention to a reasonable number of keywords - the ones that always came up in our AV keyword searches).

That page after 2 months, is now doing exceptionally well. Its pretty devoid of content, but it shows that AV is preety sensitive to keyword weightings and leaving odd around 6 to 8 lines of js lifted the ratings of this page very well.

[Brett_Tabke]

Chiyo! Hi, welcome to the forums (nice of you to drop by...on a regular basis we hope)

I miss the reference to jscript. Why do you think your hits fell? Comptability issue or navigation issue or?

[chiyo]

hi brett,

thx for the welcome.

the navigation was vastly improved and many congratualted us on it. compatable v 4's and up. however we feel the extra code overhead of around 6 to 8 lines at the very top of the HTML on every page reduced our relevancy a lot with AV mainly. (most of the code was on external js files, but it still required these lines to be embedded. All other major SE indexes showed no effect... only AV really

Congratulations on the forum. I am sure I will be spending a lot of time here.

[Brett_Tabke]

Ok, a location/size thing. Yes, I can understand that. I've been saying it for awhile that we need to be careful with java script. These engines are becoming quite fussy eaters.