AltaVista Updated?

[ihelpyou]

since when? All the sudden I see rank changes on many terms.....

[MazY]

I quickly ran off to have a look after my sad demise from AV a while back. When I used the Worldwide search option all seemed pretty the same as they have always been.

However, when I made it UK specific, I seem to have climbed to number ten for one of my most important key-phrases. Not bad considering I was nowhere to be seen a few weeks ago! But the changes don't seem over significant and it STILL hasn't spidered all pages.

[ihelpyou]

Maybe this is another one of those "clean-out" type things. I jumped 5 spots to number 5 on a key term and other terms have reacted in the same way.

More "doorway" pages dumped?

[MazY]

Could be. Certainly, there have been changes made but to be brutally honest - like many others - I don't really see them [AV] as important enough to even bother to investigate exactly what they have done.

It's quite amazing really to think that no so long ago, AV was the search engine to be seen on and now people seem to just count them as a "nice to have but not significant".

Thinking about it, I would kind of like to see them pull off a revival but I can't help thinking that their amazingly dumb and even more bewildering "let's go portal" routine kinda damaged them way beyond repair.

Anyone think they could pull off a revival as a major player in the search engines?

[ihelpyou]

Yes. Know what you mean. I am seeing an increase in traffic though over the last month. Not quite sure why as positions have not changed all that much.

For instance, this week my referral percentages are this:

MSN 25%
Google 25%
AltaVista 14%

They are number 3 this week. Steadily increasing every week. I am hopeful that AV will be back to what they were formerly, but will not hold my breath or anyone else's.

[MazY]

I suppose really it is in our interests for AV to revive themselves. The alternative is that Google becomes the only significant search engine. This would in turn mean that everyone optimizes for that one engine and thus making top positions a little bit more difficult.

I know that I would be much happier if there was more of an even spread than just Google. Eggs in one basket and all that.