Internet Marketing Robot

...easy-to-use, intelligent, internet robot that builds a link directory and creates link trades for you!

Altavista

References first 30 words on your page as a description unless you use metatags. Alta Vista determines the priority of matches by indexing the words closest to the beginning of the front page. In a simple query, Alta Vista ranks the documents found so the ones matching the most words and phrases in the query are listed first. This is achieved with a scoring algorithm; documents with a higher score appear at the head of the ranking list. A document has a higher score if: the query words or phrases are found in the first few words of the document (for example, in the title of a Web page or in the heads of Usenet news articles), the query words or phrases are found close to one another in a the document, and the document contains more than one instance of the query word or phrase. Alta Vista treats every page on the Web and every article of Usenet news as a "string" of words. Alta Vista does not index punctuation or white space. Alta Vista will index the description and keyword metatags up to a limit of 1,024 characters. Having partnered with Yahoo! in 1996, Alta Vista currently ranks as the most popular search engine on the Net. As well, C/Net's search.com uses Alta Vista as their "default" search engine.

Alta Vista has usually been consistent about indexing a submission within about 48 hours. My problem has been getting them to index more than 1 page from any one domain on any one day. I know they say on their site they will index up to 10, but they don't seem to want to do it for me!

Alta Vista is a tough search engine to get listed towards the top. Alta Vista takes advantage of Meta Tags when indexing a web site. One thing to remember when indexing your web site with Alta Vista is that Alta Vista uses a case sensitive algorithm. What this means is that typing in "FISHING" will give you a different result from "Fishing or fishing". Are you taking this into consideration when using keywords in your Meta tags? Check your spelling and try to use the words or phrases you think someone would type in to get to your web site.

AV does give higher relevance to older listings....if someone resubmitted your competors site to AV it might be interesting to see what happens (hint hint) The older listing appears above a newer one.

You should never resubmit "often". The only time you should resubmit is if you think you can improve your listings by doing so. As you point out, you can just as easily go down the list as up, on Alta Vista especially (considering their time factor relevancy).

If you register the same page on Alta Vista twice, once with the name and again with the IP address, you will get only ONE listing. Both the IP and name address will be referenced under the same listing. Try it, you'll see. In order to get those two listings you'll also need to alter the page TITLE and/or content so that it thinks they're two different pages it's not enough to simply submit two different URLs.

If you've not submitted nearly as many pages as the maximum (AltaVista 200) you should always submit fresh ones.

Your keywords can total up to 255 characters long. That includes spaces, and it counts everything that appears between content=" and ">. If your description is longer, AltaVista will just ignore the additional characters.

Note: There's no need to attempt to load your document with appropriate terms by using comments tags (<COMMENT></COMMENT> or <!-- -->) in the header or the body of the text. AltaVista Search deliberately does not index information in comment tags so your notes to yourself remain your own.

After you submit your site, do you check it?
With AltaVista it's an easy url:www.yourpage.com

AV will read your ALT image tags. All graphics should have text alternatives for AltaVista Search to find, and all words should be able to stand on their own, without graphics or multimedia files.

If a search string consists of more than one word without a '+', then URLs with the most unique word from the search string, in the title or top of the text, are appearing at the top.

In the absence of any other information, AltaVista will index all words in your document (except for comments), and will use the first few words of the document as a short abstract. It is however possible for you to control how your page is indexed by using the META tag to specify both additional keywords to index, and a short description. Let's suppose your page contains: <META name="description" content="We specialize in grooming pink poodles."> <META name="keywords" content="pet grooming, Palo Alto, dog"> AltaVista will then do two things: It will index both fields as words, so a search on either poodles or dog will match. It will return the description with the URL. In other words, instead of showing the first couple of lines of the page, a match will look like the following: Pink Poodles Inc We specialize in grooming pink poodles. http://pink.poodle.org/ - size 3k - 29 Feb 96 AltaVista will index the description and keywords up to a limit of 1,024 characters.

Recently I was doing a link:xxx search on Alta Vista to see how many sites were linked back to my  site. Each time that I did the search however, it gave me completely different numbers. The first time I searched, it told me that I had 687 sites that were linked back to me. As I moved to the next page, it told me I had 27. Is this a common thing for AV to give you one number on the outset and then a second one as you continue on?
Yes, it's normal. The number of listings reported is only a "guide" (their words).

...easy-to-use, intelligent, internet robot that builds a link directory and creates link trades for you!

   Enroll NOW for our FREE 'Real-World Marketing For Webmasters' Series

This informative series is a must-have for all webmasters.. It's helped thousands of web masters drive millions of visitors to their sites. Don't be left out.

• David Notestine's Mentoring Lessons - One-of-a-kind lessons from David Notestine's actual Internet consulting and mentoring work. Each lesson has real-life webmaster problems, questions, answers and suggestions. Everything of importance to webmasters is covered. Each lesson has forum type discussions with David Notestine and/or his consulting clients. Unique to the Internet.

• David Notestine's Marketing Messages -  Controversial, real-world marketing concepts from the creator of Zeus.

• Zeus Robot News and Alerts - Important news and alerts about the Zeus Internet Marketing Robot.

• Zeus Power Tips - Quick and easy tips on the proper use of Zeus, hints to increase your link trade response rates, fine-tuning your software and hundreds of undocumented Zeus features.

Web Site created and maintained by Saturn Web Designs

Top of page

Privacy statement, copyright and contact information Copyright © 1999 - 2008, Cyber-Robotics Inc,  all rights reserved Microsoft, Microsoft Access and Microsoft Office are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation