Thinking the untinkable - Time to ban AV

[jimmykav]

I have been considering this for some weeks now and the recent comments by Jeremy have reinforced my thinking.
I get hammered by AV every now and again - and for what? 1 or 2 referals a month, thats what.
I get 30-40 referals a week from Google.
The SERPS from AV are a joke. The relevance of the 5 pages above me for my primary keyword are obviously lower.

I am *this* close to banning that great old aunt of search engines....

Thoughts?

[msgraph]

I wonder if Altavista can be charged with massive Denial of Service attacks on sites across the globe.

[rogerd]

Oddly, I still have some sites that get decent traffic from AV. Seems like mostly older pages. New spidering seems to have little effect.

AV simply has to get the algo right. If people keep getting lousy results, they will switch SEs (as they have been doing). It's pretty sad - AV used to be my SE of choice, but now the results are almost always poor.

[Rusky]

I think the traffic is still there, a client has taken out some Goto keyords and he is getting a fair number of referrers from Alta.co.uk over 1200 in 4 days.

Which would appear to say get to the top of the list on the right keyphrase and the traffic is there.

[msgraph]

Oh I'm getting great referrals from AV and it's making me sick that I have to ban them because I will lose those spots. Everytime it appears that they are slowing their spiders down I unban them only to see their spiders go nuts a week later.

[jimmykav]

Hi Rusky
I was at #1 in the serps for a couple of months and the referals still never came.
I just dont think people use AV anymore.

[Brett_Tabke]

Not that I enjoy the counter opinion, but I've recently seen and uptick in traffic from them.

[Rusky]

Hi jimmykav

Maybe that is just down to the market you are in, and as you say, the users you used to get referrals from have moved on ??????

So for you it maybe not worth the effort.

I think it is all about the markets and the keyphrases targeted.

I just thought I would mentionmy clients experience in the last few days, it certainly opened my eyes as I too thought it was declining rapidly.

Cheers

Rusky

[jimmykav]

If only i could say the same thing Brett...
I have a real big soft spot for AV.
But it's cause im old and i know the historical significance of their engine :-)
I would not mind so much if this repeated spider flooding did hot occur.

[gethan]

I get about 1/5 of what google provides me with from AV. But this is only because I've resorted to using Goto for a few keyphrases.

I think this is a fairly reasonable comparison as I'm roughly the same position in Google as my ppc in AV.

Despite Scooter(s) visiting all 400 pages in my site, many times, only 2 of my pages are listed, the only way I can find my listings is with the domain name. Grrr - AV has to be one of the worst search engines from the webmasters point of view;

Enough visitors to make it worth bothering with, abusive spider, ridiculous pay for inclusion program, impossible to get into, unused directory, did I mention popups?. I wish it would just die and let me forget about it.

Its really sad because 4 years ago I used to swear by its results and used it all the time.

So IMO ban the spider - it does no good, any pages you already have in there are unlikely to be dropped so what is there to lose??