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Alta Optimization

         

Sathish

4:07 am on May 19, 2001 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



hi everyone,
for all the new webmasters who starts to optimize alta what are all the steps to be followed. How to start? Time to spend. Where can we find info needed to optimize altavista etc.
thank you
sathish

Marcia

10:01 am on May 19, 2001 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Sathish, welcome to WebmasterWorld.

Here is a link to Alta Vista help for webmasters [altavista.com]. It will give you a good idea, though it might not be 100% current.

Best bet is to read through the posts in the AltaVista forum here for a lot of the more current information.

Sathish

12:54 pm on May 19, 2001 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



thanx marcia,
after going through alta's FAQ i guess to be well positioned in alta or high ranking we should add keywords in title, metatags, description and add keywords as close as possible in the document ie top of the page. is this correct only this is the major part of the AV's algo. Correct me if iam wrong.

chiyo

2:55 pm on May 19, 2001 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



I think thats about right satish for a quick concise and most cost efective way of optimising. just add theming and (I think) external links to you as well to go further.. AV sees to be improving in relevancy now, though there are many other factors to confuse the equation such as Looksmart and GoTo listings.

Sathish

2:29 am on May 20, 2001 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



well if i submit my site now how long it will take to get indexed?.

my page will be crawled instantly?.

What does the scotter really looks for in our pages?.

And one question it's really worth optimizing AV or not?

Marcia

2:45 am on May 20, 2001 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Sathish, there have been a lot of changes going on at AV since December - it's hard to tell what they want at this point in time.

It is definitely not worth losing any sleep over to optimize for them now. Sites are rarely, if ever, getting added. I wouldn't bother at this point in time.

You're better off concentrating on Google now. At least it's reliable that sites will get in, even if it might take a month or two, and they're generating a lot of traffic.

It will also be worth your while to do some reading about the directories, they're very important. We've got special forums here for those.

Just my opinion, according to what I'm experiencing and reading.

backus

1:55 pm on May 21, 2001 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Sathish, unfortunately I have to agree with Marcia. AV is acting really strange lately. We are trying to work out a way of telling our clients that AV is no longer in our top 8. Thing is, people don't seem to realise the AV is going down the drain, and they still use it. Difficult one...

Sathish

1:33 pm on May 22, 2001 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



thankz for your great advice.

i don't mind optimizing google i am already in the game of google.

is google only our future?.

is there any other searchengine to be optimized don't give me the list of directorys becoz all the webmasters cann't be able spend $ in yahoo or looksmart

Dmoz- okay i agree another source of traffic and pagerank for google mainly.

NO other SE stands equal to GOOGLE. AV out of the game.

i came to know that fas-alltheweb don't have much traffic.

please tell me what should i do in this case.

What should be my next plan.

thank you.

Chris_R

2:22 pm on May 22, 2001 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



You guys are depressing me. I came here hoping there was some new evelopments, but no - AV is just going down the drain like someone else said. Too bad, they were fairly decent for a while. I have not been able to get any good results from them for well over a year now.

backus

4:47 pm on May 22, 2001 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Fast-Alltheweb has lots of traffic. Don't count it out!

Aaron

4:17 pm on May 25, 2001 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



One thing that everyone probably already knows, but anyway..

I recently found that Keywords search in AV is Case sensitive. My site is ranked 5th if the keyword search is captalised, and below 30 if not..

Seems to make a lot of difference for me..And I guess most people are lazy and use the non-capatal one.. :(

Like i think many new webmasters I get most from google.

I do get some AV hits but mainly on obscure [relatively speaking] keywords.

Marcia

4:58 am on May 26, 2001 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Chris, I'm still not 100% convinced that AV is history. After a stability with weekly updates, this instability started this past November or December, if I remember right.

It sure seems like there's a total revamping going on. I sure hope this is just temporary. We can guess, but there's no way to tell for sure right now. If it were "the end" why would there be the obvious changes there are now, even the interface?

I have one little site ("sub-site" actually) that got no AV traffic for a few months, and it's back up, almost equal to Google traffic. It's just some free graphics, so that might tell something about the demographics. It is doing very little for anything else, though.

Granted, it's more reliable to gear up for Google now, but I still have hopes, I've always liked AV.

nathan_ali

6:52 pm on May 29, 2001 (gmt 0)



Hellow WMW! Hope everyone had a great Memorial Day weekend. Just wondering if anyone has had any luck with AV lately? I'm beginning to wonder. The only thing that keeps me in the game is that a competitor just got listed (top 10 no less) and his optimization techniques are very similar to mine (we used to work together, now he's with the "enemy" ;-) ). Just wondering if anyone has had any recent results. I'm thinking maybe my comp submitted these pages some time ago and they're now just getting listed. Any thoughts on this?

P.S. I know this would be a different forum but my boss had us promptly booted off of Yahoo just after us attaining the number 5 position for the keyword we wanted. All this with one swift depression (no pun intented) of the send button on a nasty gram calling attention to a competitors site (likewise our site(s). Anyone have any suggestions as to recovery? Are we going to have to start all over? Would love any input we can get.

Thanks,
nathan & ali

2_much

8:57 pm on May 30, 2001 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Hi Nathan & Ali,

As to Altavista, a lot of people are reporting that their rankings are improving, so it looks like Altavista is refreshing its rankings. No one seems to know yet what's working, so I'd stay posted for more info. and updates.

As to your Yahoo situation, I'm not sure I understand what happened. If your site got dropped, you might be in a tough spot. We recently had a site dropped and it took me many many many calls to their directory support department to get the site added.

I'd suggest you try calling and emailing several times. If nothing works, you might have to resubmit. Be careful when you resubmit (depending on why you got dropped). I believe Yahoo keeps a record of URL's submitted, so they may not readd the same URL. If you think this might be the case, I'd suggest registering a new domain and submitting the new one.

Hope this helps!

nathan_ali

9:35 pm on Jun 4, 2001 (gmt 0)



Thanks 2_Much. Sorry it took so long to reply to this post. Been in the trenches if you know what I mean. You're right about the AV thing. Checked rankings this morning. We're not only back on but we're 1 and 2 for our keywords. Ragings search reflecting the same. Thanks for the advise on Yahoo. That's exactly what Nathan is trying right now.

The one we got dropped for was built specifically for Yahoo but we work for a guy who doesn't know much about the game just wants the sales. You know how that can be. Anyhoo he e-mailed Yahoo because he was upset about a competitor and brought unwanted attention to us as well. The whole trying a new domain name thing was the tactic we used and we're successful on until the fatal e-mail from the big boss to the editors of Yahoo. So, long story short I guess we'll take another whack at it with yet another domain name and this time tape our bosses fingers to the arms of his chair.

Off this forums subject but anyone having any luck with Direct Hit. I was doing fairly well on there and now I seem to fallen off the face of the earth. Anyone else experienced this or is it just me? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance. I appreciate the help.
Ali

lawman

4:36 pm on Jun 5, 2001 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



Back in October of last year I submitted several pages optimized for various keywords to AV. Most of my pages occupied top ten for the keywords. Then a slow decline began until I couldn't find any optimized pages in the top thirt much less the top ten. Suddenly I have listings for pages optimized for certain keywords back in the top ten. I'd almost given up on AV. Hope whatever they are doing sticks.

For what it's worth, even with good webpage placement, AV has never been among my top ten referrers.