How Does It Work!?

Hello Everyone!

Up to now I have only really concentrated on SEO for Google - for obvious reasons. But I would like to know how paying to be listed in AltaVista actually works.

Yes, I know you can wait to get listed and that the traffic from AV isn't anything to get excited about, but assuming that link popularity is important to their algo - wouldn't you have to wait for their entire index to be updated to reap the rewards of good link building anyway?

In which case, what's the point of paying to be listed (for a brand new site I mean) in the first place? Does it work like this for other paid inclusion SE's also?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

-Jon :-D

Hi Jon, not sure about av but i use paid inclusion for inktomi and see the reults in msn overture etc. The main reason I use it is to make sure that I get my customers in the top 10 results for their index page. Once this has been achieved you know that when the other pages are crawled the page can only get better rankings. Customers love to see results in 72 hours as well and as long as you use the robots index follow tags it should be weeks rather than months before the other pages get crawled. Hope this helps.

Thanks Gary, that does help!

Would you say that off page criteria (ie, PR and inbound link text) is less important when optimizing for Inktomi?

-Jon

To be honest Jon I never optimise any of my sites for 1 particular engine. I simply use good tried and tested seo. At the moment pr counts for nothing as it is still not working properly and I dont think inktomi pays it any attention anyhow. As for inbound link text I think that it will help. I generally find that if I get a good result in google then I get a better result in msn overture etc that inktomi feeds. Also I find the the H tag carries a fair bit of weight.

Gary.

Garybag1 - please explain more about "Customers love to see results in 72 hours as well and as long as you use the robots index follow tags" What is the best robots index coding to use for such?

Thanks - Randall

if you pay for inclusion your page will be listed in 48-72 hours and then refreshed every 48 hours or so. Customers love to see their site listed so quickly.
The robots coding I use is
<meta name="robots" content="all">
I find this works for me, there are other ways but as I said this works for me.
Hope that helps.
Gary