Alta Vista Add URL - AltaVista is a search engine that uses many sources to produce its results. These sources include Looksmart, the Open Directory, Real Names, and its own web-crawling spider. After submitting a search phase to AltaVista, the user, by default, is given AltaVista's web page matches, which are produced by Alta Vista's web page index. AltaVista does not provide a directory option, but does offer a LookSmart search from the bottom of each page.
AltaVista Paid Submission - AltaVista offers a paid submission program. One specific page is spidered (no crawling from there) and indexed, commonly within a week. This service is mandatory and is commonly provided as part of a Search Engine Optimization project.
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 determing 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, Alta Vista will not index pages that are substantially duplicated. Allow 3 to 4 week Add cycles with subsequent monthly spidering.
CAUTION: We have used the AltaVista paid submission program. When spidered our initial ranking was #12 for "search engine optimization". Two days later we settled at #4. When resubmitted thru the paid program we immediately returned to #12, then 2 days later we were back to #4. We believe that the paid submission spider was causing us to decrease in ranking from #4 to #12. To avoid this penalty, once we were #4 we changed the spidered page (yes, you can do that) to another page from our site. Oops - the page ranked as #4 was immediately and totally removed from the AltaVista index. So it seems that once you are paying for spidering, you must always pay for spidering or you will be deleted from the AltaVista index, and must wait weeks for the "free" submission to re-index your site.
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) it's own index.
AltaVista shares a great many spam rules that are common to other search engines, but they have a specific virtual IP spam note that "if being found via search engines is 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: spam-support@altavista.com
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.
The following search engines or directories provide content to AltaVista:
Looksmart
Overture
The following search engines receive content from AltaVista:
None
Reading through an article from ClickTracks, they pose a number of questions, one of which is: "How is Google's new AdWord Syndication mechanism going to affect your site traffic, sales, and expenses?"
What does ClickTracks Analyzer's new Syndication report show?
It shows the URL of the page on which visitors see a syndicated ad before clicking through to your site. By clicking on ClickTracks new icon, found in the Task Wizard, you can compare and contrast visitors from regular Google AdWord results to Google AdWord Syndication results.
This page elaborates on Google's new "content targeting" mechanism versus their AdWords tool. By using ClickTracks to analyze their own Overture and Google campaigns, the company found that visitors from "content targeted adds" were behaving differently from other PPC visitors. So they in turn developed this new feature so users of their software could track these visitors more clearly.
After running this test, ClickTracks was able to monitor the behavior of syndication visitors and found these visitors spend less time on their site than regular AdWords visitors.
They found that visitors coming from Syndicated Adwords were quickly hitting the back button soon after they arrived. ClickTracks concluded that they would not use Syndicated AdWords for their site, but emphasize that each site is very different and thus, the results may be different. ClickTrack's new report will reveal whether Syndication Adwords or regular Adwords will optimize your marketing dollar.
To try this new tool free for 30 days, click on this link and follow the directions provided.
Teoma is a technology company that measures the authority as well as the popularity of websites. It powers other search engines, specifically Ask Jeeves, as well as powering its own search engine. It is owned by Ask Jeeves who merged DirectHit with Teoma in early April, 2002.
Teoma uses what they have branded as Subject-Specific Popularity, which ranks a site based on the number of same-subject pages in other ranked sites that link to it. It does not simply use general popularity (page count) to determine a site's level of authority. It does not help your ranking on Teoma to be in a link farm.
Teoma also has has crawling spider technology and thus any submission will lead to a full site being indexed.
The following search engines or directories provide content to Teoma:
Ask Jeeves (Submission)
Google (Adwords Select)
The following search engines receive content from Teoma:
Ask Jeeves
Teoma's paid submission (and pricing information) is available here.
In our ongoing study of pay-per-click search engines, we have found the following to be (currently) true:
Top-Tier Engines:
Google Adwords Select: 30-40 cents will buy you a top 3 listing for most specialized products. General search terms can range much higher.
Overture: 15-30 cents for most specialized products will land you a top 3 position.
Second-Tier Engines:
FindWhat.com: 10-20 cents will land you a quality listing. This is definitely the most effective of the second-tier engines, but it is still a big step down from Google and Overture in terms of potential traffic.
Kanoodle.com: 5-10 cents for a quality listing.
GoClick.com: 5-10 cents for a quality listing (with some exceptions such as "Marketing" at 40 cents).
Search123.com: 5-10 cents for a quality listing.
SearchFeed.com: 5-15 cents for a quality listing.
AhHa.com: 1-5 cents for a quality listing.
ePilot.com: 5-10 cents for a quality listing.
Xuppa.com: 1-5 cents for a quality listing.
Typically, second-tier engines generate about 25%-40% of the traffic that the top-tier sites do.
Third-tier engines consist for the most part of new sites. Some of these offer extremely low rates, while others offer package click deals. These engines include SearchChum.com, TowerSearch.com, Fazzle.com, and others.
The current plan would be to have paid listings show up in a pop-under whenever a Gator "Search Scout" user utilizes a search engine. The premise is that this Scout will offer "alternate search listings." In essence, when a user types "waffles" into Google, they will get a pop-under that has paid Overture listings that Gator deems are appropriate.
The reaction so far has been mostly negative. First, there is significant doubt that it will drive qualified traffic. On many of the forums devoted to webmasters and advertisers, the general feeling is that it will drive largely unqualified traffic to websites for premium prices. Secondly, ads will appear in places that the advertiser will not be able to control, and possibly compromise the reputation of the participants.
Could advertisers be facing an ethical dilemma? Overture hasn't released a plan for integration yet, but Gator is the single-most hated piece of software on the Internet. It alters websites without users or webmasters' permission and hijacks commissions. Advertisers may inadvertently find themselves supporting one of the very applications that is stealing commissions from them or placing pop-up advertisements that trigger when people access their site. The Scout pop-unders will be appearing on search engines and portals without their permission, and if it's anything like Gator's usual software, it will install itself without some users realizing it's been done.
Performance is something that remains to be seen, and the major questions -- ethics aside -- will take time to be answered. The traffic it will drive may very well convert, and it has the potential to pay off. The initial backlash of companies and webmasters who refuse to participate in anything that Gator attaches its name to, however, may hurt Overture. How that may affect bids and traffic remains to be seen.
SplitHit is a piece of software that enables a webmaster to serve alternate pages to users and test performance. The webmaster simply creates two or more versions of the page he/she wishes to test and SplitHit alternates which is shown. SplitHit then monitors user behavior and seperates the data by which page was shown to the users.
The software has recieved excellent reviews, appears to be part of a rather extensive affiliate campaign and -- as a 3-4 year old program -- has stood the test of time. It is definately worth a test, but one must wonder how search engines would treat it, since it's serving several different pages.
SplitHit costs $29.95, and is available at http://www.splithit.com/
With so many service providers out there, why should we consider running our own affiliate program instead of outsourcing this task? One word: Control. Our affiliates are our affiliates, instead of being the provider's.
Basically, what it boils down to is that if we were to go with someone like Commission Junction, we are stuck with them. Any affiliates who utilize us are actually CJ's. If, for some reason we decided to leave CJ, we would lose all of our affiliates. Leaving a service provider would cost us far more than some small trasition troubles; it would require starting over completely from scratch.
Programs like MyAffiliateProgram offer management options that would allow us to hire them to manage the program for us and upgrade or downgrade their service to us as we see fit. It would also give us control over everything. We can run it ourselves or hire them for everything from simple account management to aggressive partnership recruiting.
There is talk of Google rewarding outbound links as well as inbound links. No one knows how, and the Google rep on webmasterworld isn't talking other than to say that Google recognizes an "authority" (inbound links) value and a "hub" (outbound links) value. They view having a massive imbalance as a bad thing and may penalize for such.
For more on Google Pagerank, see this entry.
This is a very useful tool that creates a chart of all the pages that are related to your website within Google's database. The "nodes" of the chart correspond to the search results listed when one enters a URL into Google and and then clicks on the "Similar to" link. The TouchGraph Google Browser is available here.
A similar tool exists for Amazon.com, and is available here.
Both of these tools require that you have Java 1.3 or better installed on your system.