Know Your Neighbors!
The concept of virtual hosting, where a Web hosting company may host 10 or 12 Web sites on the same IP address, was a revealing topic of discussion during our interview. Erika acknowledged, "What we see on the Internet is that there are the IP equivalents of good neighborhoods and bad neighborhoods. So we see it fairly frequently where people on a certain IP exhibit a certain kind of behavior..."
Frames
If you have information inside frames, you probably face a challenge gaining rankings in AltaVista, but it is not an absolute barrier. AltaVista indexes the outside of the frame as a distinct page. It will also index each pane of the frame window as a separate page. That means that if the content matching a query is in a pane, then visitors clicking on those links will see only the pane, not the full page as it was originally designed. So if you want visitors from AltaVista to experience your pages in a certain way, you should have non-frames as well as frames versions of those pages, and submit the non-frames versions.
AltaVista (AV) is an undisputed veteran of the search engine industry. Their initial search engine endeavors trace back to the mid '90s. AltaVista has made use of their early lead to remain a forceful competitor in this ever-changing industry. With over 500 million Web pages indexed and more than 40 million search queries a day, AltaVista remains a major force in the search industry. I had an opportunity to catch up with AltaVista's Erica Aks, Manager of Content Engineering and distinguished Engineer Edgar Whipple. The topics of our conversation ranged from the best ways to submit, to the importance of knowing who your virtual neighbors are. This is an interview search engine optimizers should read with great interest. The team we interviewed is AltaVista's first line of defense against spam.
With over 1.3 billion documents currently indexed and roughly 29 million daily searches, Google has emerged as a search powerhouse for the 21st century. Partnered with the industry powerhouse, Yahoo!, Google has established itself as a market leader. Much of Google's strength can be credited to their uncompromising attitude towards search. Google strives to make their search experience "an easy, honest and objective way to find high-quality websites with information relevant to your search" (www.google.com).
As the Internet and search technologies mature, one thing remains clear - Internet search is most effective when the user is presented with a hybrid of results from a spider-based search engine and a human-edited directory. My conversation with Chris Tolles of the Open Directory Project shows that he firmly understands the importance of having both crawler-based search services and human-edited directories. The bottom line is that search engine marketing does not work if one or the other is ignored; therefore, it is important to focus search-positioning campaigns on both. The blend in fact benefits the user and the search engine marketer.
As many of you may know, Fredrick Marckini is the founder and CEO of iProspect.com, one of the country's leading search engine positioning companies.
