My site has been listed in AltaVista for quite a few months and had obtained excellent rankings in it, which made AltaVista one of my biggest referrers in terms of the traffic that my site was getting. However, a couple of days ago, I found to my dismay that AltaVista had stopped sending any visitors to my site. I then checked my rankings in AltaVista and found that my site was nowhere to be found. Not only that, when I checked which pages in my site were listed in AltaVista, it told me that none of the pages in my site were listed! Can you tell me what's wrong?

Lucy Marvin

Answer:

Hi Lucy,

There are 2 reasons why this may have occured - i) your site was down when AltaVista visited your site to re-spider it, or ii) you have done something that AltaVista considers spamming.

Let's take the second case first. Ask yourself the following questions:

i) Did you use hidden text (i.e. text with the same color as the background color)?

ii) Did you repeat your keywords too many times in the Meta Keywords tag or the body of your site?

iii) Did you use page cloaking?

iv) Did you try to boost the link popularity of your site by joining a link farm which gives the same pages of links to all its members?

v) In order to get good rankings in the search engines, have you created different pages which are very similar to each other in terms of content?

If you answered Yes to any of the above questions, then your site has probably been banned for spamming. In this case, what you should do is to remove the offending feature and submit your site again. If you have used hidden text, remove this text. If you have repeated keywords too many times, remove some of the repetitions of the keywords. If you are using page cloaking, stop using it. If you are a member of a link farm, cancel your membership and remove the page(s) containing links to the other members' sites from your site. If you have created different pages which look very similar to each other, remove all but one of these pages. After you have done this, re-submit your site to AltaVista and wait for a month or so. If you are lucky, you may be able to get listed again. However, if after a month, your site is still not listed, you should send a polite email to AltaVista requesting them to tell you why your site was de-listed. Wait for a few days and see if they respond to you. If they don't, then you could be out of luck. In this case, you are better off setting up a new web site and submitting this new site to AltaVista. Make sure that the new web site is hosted in its own domain and has an I.P. address which is different from that of your original web site. Also, make sure that you do nothing in this new site that could potentially get you banned for spamming.

If you are absolutely confident that you have done nothing that any engine would consider to be spamming, then your site was probably de-listed because it was down when AltaVista came to spider it. In this case, you should select a more reliable web host, transfer all the new pages of your site to the new server, and then submit your site again to AltaVista. AltaVista should spider your site soon.

QUESTION 2:

I have the #1 ranking in Google for a keyword. Yet, I have received all of 3 visitors from Google for this keyword in the last month. Can you explain why? I have started wondering as to whether search engine positioning is as useful as it is made out to be.

Harry Quartermain

Answer:

Hi Harry,

Yes, search engine positioning IS as useful as it is made out to be :-) There could be a couple of reasons why you are not getting enough traffic from this keyword:

i) The keyword is not popular among users. A common mistake that many people make is to optimize their sites for keywords that they feel users may search on, but which users don't actually search on. That is why I always recommend that when you begin optimizing your site, you first spend as much time as is needed to select the most effective keywords for your site. Getting high rankings for certain keywords are not going to do you much good if you select keywords which are not popular, or which are not relevant to your site. In order to find out how you can select the most effective keywords for your site, see my article at http://www.1stSearchRanking.com/t.cgi?99&keywords.htm

ii) Your site is not being presented attractively in the search results. When a page in your site is displayed in response to a query, the Title tag of the page is used to provide a link to your site from the search results. After this, a short description of your site is displayed. This description can be taken from various sources, depending on the engine. While some engines take the description from the Meta Description tag, there are others who take it from the first few words present in the body of the page. Google, on the other hand, takes the description from the part of the page which contains the keyword that the searcher has searched for.

Now when a person searches in a search engine, she generally quickly scans through some of the results that are displayed, and clicks on the site which seems to be the most relevant to her query. In order to ensure that it is your site which she clicks on rather than the other sites which also have good rankings, you need to ensure that the Title tag of the page is attractive to humans. For engines other than Google, you need to ensure that the Meta Description tag and the first few words in the body of the page are also attractive to humans. For Google, you need to ensure that the words in and around the portions of the page which contains the keywords are attractive to human beings.

It is likely that the reason you are not getting traffic in spite of getting a good ranking is a combination of the above 2 factors - i.e. the keyword is not popular to start with, and on top of that, the Title and the description of your site that is displayed in unattractive.

QUESTION 3:

I know that link popularity is an important factor when it comes to determining the ranking of my site. Can you tell me how many links I should aim to get in order to ensure that I get a good ranking?

Henry Edelfield

Answer:

Hi Henry,

The number of links that you need to get in order to get a high ranking in the search engines depends to a large extent on the number of links your competitors (who are currently ranked well in the search engines) have. If these competitors have only a few links leading to their sites, then you can get a high ranking by having only a few links leading to your site. If these competitors have thousands of links to their sites, you may need thousands of links to your site in order to get high rankings.

You should also note that what is important is not only the number of links but also the quality of the links. Links from sites which are related to yours are more important than links from sites which are unrelated to yours. The link popularity that you get by getting listed in important directories like Yahoo! and the Open Directory are more important than links from all other sites.

Hence, when you are trying to improve the link popularity of your site, you should first get your site listed in Yahoo! and the Open Directory. You should then try to get as many links as possible from sites which are related to yours (but are not direct competitors).

In order to learn how you can get your site listed in Yahoo! and the Open Directory, see my articles at http://www.1stSearchRanking.com/t.cgi?99&yahoo-submission.htm and http://www.1stSearchRanking.com/t.cgi?99&open-directory.htm

In order to learn the different methods by which you can improve the link popularity of your site, see my article at http://www.1stSearchRanking.com/t.cgi?99&link-popularity.htm