Inside Guide to Getting Listed on AltaVista

In Depth Analysis

The Lowdown: AltaVista is a search engine run by Digital Equipment Corporation. Once very popular, it has lost ground recently as other search engines have joined the rush for "value added content" i.e. stock quotes, chat zones and personalization. AltaVista has fought back with free email, free translation services and other similar value added services, but this push towards a wider relevance has brought mixed results as it is also the catalyst behind Yahoo!'s break with AltaVista as a partner search provider.

AltaVista has recently made changes to its algorithm that make it almost impossible to rank well with any given set of search terms. In essence, in a bid to curb spamming, AltaVista assigns a lower relevance rating for sites that repeat the search terms in their pages. However, the algorithm's threshold is set far too low, with the result that, for any given search, only sites that are peripherally related to the topic will be returned.

Hopefully AltaVista is working on this "feature" and the ranking process will be a little more sane next time around. In the meantime, submit your site for completeness, but don't expect too much from them.

A Tip: AltaVista's ranking algorithm takes into account the age of the listing (not the age of the page itself, but the age of the listing for the page on AltaVista). That's why you'll almost never find "new" pages indexed on AltaVista; if you look carefully at the results returned from a search, most of the pages that rank well will have dates going back several months. A corollary of this is that you should not resubmit your pages every few days, because you'll just be knocking yourself back down to the bottom of the heap when you do so (Sisyphus, anyone?) Just let time work its magic, and you'll find your site slowly rising through the rankings.

Another Tip: AltaVista has signed a deal with RealName. RealName provides a service whereby you can just type keywords into a box to find a website. For instance, type "pepsi" and get taken immediately to Pepsi's site. This is essentially a pay-per-listing search engine with a touch of the smoke-and-mirrors to hide what it really is. Nevertheless, if you are trying to wring every last drop of promotion-related performance out of AltaVista you might want to consider signing up for a RealName. They cost $40 per year; for your money, you can register any non-generic word or phrase. For instance, you could register "Bob's books" but not "books" as the latter would be too generic.

The rules for matching a RealName are very simple: if a RealName matches the search expression exactly, the RealName system will take you straight to the site. If there is no exact match, all the RealNames that come close are displayed.

A cool trick: If you want to understand websites or email written in other languages such as French or German, or even if you want to produce a (very) rudimentary translation of your own site, AltaVista has just the service for you! The service is called Babelfish (after the "creature" of the same name from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) and provides free, very fast translations of text or HTML pages. It will even make a credible attempt at an in-place translation, showing the resultant page with the same layout and graphics, but with translated text. Wonderful stuff!

Partnerships: AltaVista has a content-sharing deal with LookSmart. LookSmart provides the content for the "Categories" area of AltaVista, and in return LookSmart searches default to AltaVista if there are no matching sites in LookSmart's own directory.

Worth Noting

Even if your site is not in English, it is worth listing it with AltaVista as it distinguishes over 20 languages in searches. You don't even need to submit to a separate directory; the AltaVista engine supports multiple languages from the same database.

With Digital's impending sale to Compaq, there could be some doubts over the future of the AltaVista search engine and site.