Placement Requirements

AltaVista is example of a full-text search engine, meaning that it will read all text that appears on your page. The use of keywords in the Title and in the first lines of text is critical to getting well ranked on AltaVista. AltaVista also considers Link relevancy in determining rankings. AltaVista will also consider the use of keyword phrases in the Meta Tags, Comments, and Headers. Only submit 3 to 5 pages per day and be VERY careful not to Spam by submitting too often. AltaVista is a crawling spider technology and thus any Submission will lead to a full site being indexed. Note that while there is not a known limit to the pages that can be indexed, AltaVista will not Index pages that are substantially duplicated. Allow 3 to 4 week add cycles with subsequent monthly Spidering.

NOTE - that AltaVista no longer spiders full sites using links between pages. You must submit the specific page you want indexed or it will not be located and indexed.

Results are presented in the following sequence: 1) featured (doubleclick ad), 2) Overture (2 entries), and 3) its own index.

Suggestions and Tips for Best Results

AltaVista shares a great many spam rules that are common to other search engines, "being found via search engines are important to your business, be very careful about where you have your pages hosted. If the hosting service also hosts spammers and pornographers, you could wind up being penalized or excluded simply because the underlying IP address for that service is the same for all the virtual domains it includes." Report spam: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

The thing to remember is that you must have suitable URL content and be engineered to beat your competition within AltaVista before you register your pages. Just registering with AltaVista does not assure a suitable Ranking.