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Search Engine Optimization

Roger Gonzales

How AltaVista Works

AltaVista has an index that is built by sending out a crawler (a robot program) that captures text and brings it back.

The main crawler is called "Scooter." Scooter sends out thousands of threads simultaneously. 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, Scooter and its cousins access thousands of pages at a time, like thousands of blind users grabbing text, pulling it back, throwing it into the indexing machines so the next day that text can be in the index. And at the same time, they pull off, from all those pages, every hyperlink that they find, to put in a list of where to go to next.

In a typical day Scooter and its cousins visit over 10 million pages. If there are a lot of hyperlinks from other pages to yours, that increases your chances of being found. But if this is your own personal site, or if this is a brand new Web page, that's not too likely.

AltaVista has in incredibly large database of Web sites, such that searches often return hundreds of thousands of Web site matches. AltaVista's spider goes down about three pages into your site. This is important to remember if you have different topical pages that won't be found within three clicks of the main page. You will have to index them separately.

You cannot tell Alta Vista how to index your site, it is all done via their spider, but you can go to their site and give the spider a nudge by submitting specific pages. That way, AltaVista's spider knows to visit that page and index it. Once you have done that, it's all up to your META tags and your page's content! AltaVista's spider may revisit your site each month after its initial visit.

AltaVista ranking algorithms reward keywords in the <TITLE> tag. If a keyword is not in a title tag, it will likely not appear anywhere near the top of the search results! AltaVista also rewards keywords near one another, and keywords near the beginning of a page

Add a Page

Adding a page through AltaVista’s Add URL form doesn’t guarantee that the page would be listed. It usually takes around 4 to 6 weeks to show up. You don't have to have any special authority to "add a page." This is not a directory, like Yahoo!, where the information provider has to submit information and has to prove they are who they say they are. You do not have to do this with AltaVista. It will go and check and bring back whatever text it finds at that address.

If you give it a URL for a page that doesn't exist, it will come back with Error 404, which means there is no such page. If that page was in the index, it will remove that page from the index the next day.

This is very important from several perspectives. Say you have changed the directory structure at your Web site. First, you should go to AltaVista and Add a Page for all the old addresses to remove the old information from the index. Then you should Add a Page for all the new addresses. Also, if you made an embarrassing typo or posted a document that you shouldn't have, and removed that page from the Web, you can Add URL for that page at AltaVista to make sure the information is not perpetuated in the index.
 

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What AltaVista doesn’t Index

Copyright © Roger Gonzales
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