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There is also the Hide and Seek Factor that is going on at AltaVista. One moment a page will show up in the top listings, and the next minute it is gone only to reappear at a later time.
Comments from AltaVista suggest that this is related to "server balancing" during peek request periods of time on the Internet. But in my personal testing that just doesn't hold water. If you test ranks during the time frames when Internet traffic is at it's most quiet level you will get the same wacked out results.
And talk about wacked out results! Let's look at just one.
At least as of the time I am posting this, if you search AltaVista for the term "lemonade" you will find [lemonade.com...] listed in the #9 spot.
[altavista.com...]
The hoot to this ranking is that lemonade.com contains absolutly no content. There are not even any Meta tags on the page. In fact, the entire web site is composed of two graphics that when clicked alternate between index.html and index2.html. And inbound link populartiy? It is in the dismal 30's.
So from a SEO perspective the message would seem to be to get a high ranking in AltaVista all you need to do is get a good domain name, title your page with that domain name and include zero content.
But let's go a little farther on our examination of lemonade.com.
Go over to AltaVista and type in host:lemonade.com (no www) to see how many pages are in the index from this domain.
Instead of finding only pages from lemonade.com you will also find pages from:
p-lemonade.com
lemonade.com.au
and
bees-lemonade.com
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Anyway, this is only one example of the wacked out results on AltaVista these days. And I realize this is anecdotal evidence. But in closing I'll add one more thing.
Do a search on AltaVista for "anecdotal."
Positions 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 9 all take you to catagories in Yahoo!
[altavista.com...]
Can any of you make any sense of this?
Source Code of the Site as Below
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<html>
<title>lemonade</title>
<body bgcolor="#66CC33" text="#ff0000">
<table border=0 height=100% width=100%>
<tr>
<td align=center>
<a href="index2.html"><img src="sonic_lisa_tricia_puffs.gif" alt="lisa! sonic! tricia!" border="0"></a>
<p>
<font face="helvetica, arial, lucida" size=2>
</font>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</body>
</html>
-------------------------------------
Well the site has only one meaningful word in it and that is the Title Tag. lemonade. I say ranking is well justified. But that does not mean that I am saying that AltaVista is the best or the worst search engine.
