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Search Engine Optimization

Roger Gonzales

AltaVista Ranking Rules

The simple rule of thumb is that content counts, and that content near the top of a page counts for more than content at the end.

In particular, the HTML title and the first couple lines of text are the most important part of your pages. If the words and phrases that match a query happen to appear in the HTML title or first couple lines of text of one of your pages, chances are very good that that page will appear high in the list of search results.

 AltaVista bases its ranking on both static factors (a computation of the value of page independent of any particular query) and query-dependent factors.

It values:  Long pages, which are rich in meaningful text (not randomly generated letters and words).

 Pages that serve as good hubs, with lots of links to pages that that have related content (topic similarity, rather than random meaningless links, such as those generated by link exchange programs or intended to generate a false impression of "popularity").

 The connectivity of pages, including not just how many links there are to a page but where the links come from: the number of distinct domains and the "quality" ranking of those particular sites.

This is calculated for the site and also for individual pages. A site or a page is "good" if many pages at many different sites point to it, and especially if many "good" sites point to it.

 The level of the directory in which the page is found. Higher is considered more important. If a page is buried too deep, and the crawler simply won't go that far and will never find it.

These static factors are recomputed about once a week, and new good pages slowly percolate upward in the rankings. Note that there are advantages to having a simple address and sticking to it, so others can build links to it, and so you know that it's in the index Query-dependent factors include:

 The HTML title.

 The first lines of text.

 Query words and phrases appearing early in a page rather than late.

 Meta tags, which are treated as ordinary words in the text, but like words that appear early in the text (unless the meta tags are patently unrelated to the content on the page itself, in which case the page will be penalized)

 Words mentioned in the "anchor" text associated with hyperlinks to your pages. (E.g., if lots of good sites link to your site with anchor text "breast cancer" and the query is "breast cancer," chances are good that you will appear high in the list of matches.)  

 . .....more on

AltaVista policy on doorway pages and cloaking

Copyright © Roger Gonzales
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