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Give the great folks at WMW your URL and as much info as you can and we'll help you out.
Do you have an email address for AltaVista? I used their contact form at [help.altavista.com...] selected destination="URL Listing Support" and got back this reply:
"We apologize if your site has not yet been indexed into the AltaVista
Search Index. While we reserve the right to block sites at our own
discretion, we do follow the guidelines listed on the following pages:
[doc.altavista.com...]
We suggest you read the our guidelines and modify your site
accordingly. Once you modify your site, please feel free to submit it
again using our Add URL page:
My message was not asking about not being indexed; it was asking why my sites had been dropped. I visited the specified "guidelines" page, clicked on "Combatting Spam" and found that it only talks about very extreme, idiotic tactics that I have never employed.
Here is my suspicion: I have a network of sites that are interlinked with relevant keywords as anchor text. They are not mirror sites, though they have similar content. For about two months, they were doing VERY well on AV... to the point that I was concerned because they were monopolizing the rankings. Most likely a competitor complained.
But I am only guessing and wish I could find out. And if cross linking is the problem, what are the guidelines? If similar content is the problem, what are the guidelines? Unfortunately, our flagship site was one of the ones dropped, and it has been in their index for over five years. It has always been considered an "authority" site and linked to by many sites without our even asking. I have never traded links and enjoy hundreds of inbound links. It is in both Yahoo! and ODP.
How do I get our flagship site back into the index? It is very hard when they wont even reply with anything useful.
Any help will be appreciated, and perhaps it will help istfannous as well.
What you are after is something called service, which AV has none I've sent many e-mails to AV with nothing but the standard e-mail reply.
I was approached by a company after there own efforts to get rankings had failed but in the meantime had also been banned by AV.
Nothing was every resolved and in the end the client purchase another domain which is now ranking quite well, my advise would be to stop wasting time with polite e-mails to AV go out get another domain and start again.
You could also do a site search here as many people in the asked for help and it may give you some idea of the problem you have. Good luck
