Attempts to fill AltaVista's index with misleading or promotional pages lower the value of the index for everyone and render Web indices and your search experience worthless. We do not allow URL submissions from customers who spam the index and will exclude all such pages from the index. "
[Reference document]

They further state that they frown upon;

1. pages with text that is not easily read, either because it is too small or is obscured by the background of the page, pages with off-topic or excessive keywords,
2. duplication of content, either by excessive submission of the same page, submitting the same pages from multiple domains, or submitting the same content from multiple hosts,
3. machine-generated pages with minimal or no content, whose sole purpose is to get a user to click to another page,
4. pages that contain only links to other pages, or pages whose primary intent is to redirect users to another page.

Breaking this list down, you can see that Alta Vista is committed to keeping their index as "clean" as possible. However, this list does lead to some interesting questions. Information pages, which are created by some popular search submission programs are clearly frowned upon. So is the idea of duplicating your site across multiple locations then submitting each location (another common search engine boosting trick, but don't try it!).

Further one must wonder about the value of a "front door" page to a website. A typical "front door", sometimes also called a "splash page" is usually a simple, graphics only page which either redirects the user to the main page, or lets them click to it. Alta Vista is clearly stating they do not like this common web design technique.

Alta Vista has changed their submission policy to halt the submission of sites from automated submission systems. As a result they now display a computer generated series of alphanumeric symbols which you must hand re-type in order to successfully submit your site to them. This makes it impossible for a submission to alta vista from any sort of program. You must either hand submit your site to Alta Vista or you must insure that the submission service you use, hand submits for you.

Another change they've made is that they have partnered with the LookSmart directory. LookSmart insists that you pay a $199.00 (US) fee when you submit. Fortunately Alta Vista has allowed people to bypass this submission service and go directly to the still free submission to the search engine. The biggest problem with the LookSmart submission is due to the fact that they have partnered with several search engines at this point, including Alta Vista and Excite. So be cautious! It is possible to make a mistake and accidently submit your site more than once to LookSmart! If you've paid the LookSmart fee once during a submission, do not do it again.

Alta Vista will index as much of your html as it possibly can, including alt text comments in image statements, titles, urls, directory names, visible text, image maps and meta tags. Alta Vista ignores html comments.

Alta Vista utilizes the meta keywords tag and the meta description tag. The keywords help increase the relevancy of a page to a particular search term or terms, while the description tag is used instead of using the visible page text from the page. The example below was located by searching on "Web Design north Idaho" in Alta Vista.

1. Northern Webs - North Idaho's Premier Web Design Studio

Northern Webs, North Idaho's most experienced Web Design...
URL: www.northernwebs.com/index.php
Last modified 6-Apr-99 - page size 8K - in English [ Translate ]

There are several important things that need to be noted here. The title of the listing was obtained directly from the html <title> tag. If you omit a title, Alta Vista substitutes a "NO TITLE" in place of where your title would have gone.

The description for this entry came directly from our meta description tag. Alta Vista dates the entry so it makes it easier to track updates making their way into the index.

Should you omit your Meta Description tag, Alta Vista will use up to 150 characters of visible text as your summary for a listing. Such is the case of the listing below which came from a page containing no meta tags.

13. Sydney Morning Herald - I.T. - Columns

NET RESOURCES. Tuesday, August 12, 1997. HOTMAIL www.hotmail.com If you're one of those people who jump from computer to computer and subsequently find it.
URL: www.smh.com.au/computers/content/970812/...s/columns5.html
Last modified 28-Apr-99 - page size 6K - in English [ Translate ]

"Content counts; content near the top of a page counts more than content at the end. In particular, the HTML title and the first few lines of text are the most important part of your pages. If the words and phrases that match a query happen to appear in the HTML title or first lines of text of one of your pages, chances are very good that that page will appear high in the list of search results. "
[Reference Document]

Content. A lot of people ask us what is "content"? Content is what you are reading, its why our main page contains mostly text instead of images (a departure from the typical design company). In a nutshell content is TEXT. This is the meat and potatoes for all search engines, including Alta Vista. The lack of content is probably the major reason why so many sites fail to achieve a reasonable ranking.

Clearly this isn't the only method Alta Vista uses to determine ranking. But search terms and the inclusion of such terms within a website are considered paramount importance in Alta Vista. This sort of consideration will be very important in latter sections of this site where we consider keywords and their relevancy to the visible page content.

Alta Vista considers meta tags to be of secondary importance when ranking a page. In fact one part of their faq actually goes on to state;

"Basically, METAtags are a band aid to help you deal with pages that don't state what they are about in clear text, right up front. Do it right to begin with, and you don't need METAtags at all. You'll get far better results in terms of search engine traffic that way."
[Reference Document]

While this might be true for Alta Vista, it is definitely not true for other systems. If you design your site, with the search engines in mind, then they are right, the combination of spider friendly html and reasonable content do tend to make pages appear higher in the indexes. The inclusion of meta tags only help boost rankings slightly in Alta Vista.

Alta Vista also uses site popularity to help boost the ranking of a website. Unfortunately this method has a tendency to penalize newer websites. In essence site popularity means how many sites are linking back to you. The more sites that link to you, the higher the ranking your site will recieve. One of Alta Vista's most useful features for a webmaster is the ability to find out how many sites are linking to you. Just add your url into the box below and you will find out how many sites are linking to you. Note that because of the distributed nature of the Alta Vista database, this number can vary depending upon server loads, so its best to take this number several times, keeping only the highest number.

Another nice way of using Alta Vista, find out how many pages of your site are in the index. This is critical, if you can find only one page (your main index file), then most likely you have a problem with your design that is blocking the Alta Vista spider from finding and indexing the other pages in your site.

Just enter your primary domain name in the box below, for example "url:www.northernwebs.com". Remember that your results will vary depending on server loads. But if you only come up with one result, you might want to look further at your design to see what you can do to increase the number of pages indexed.

Alta Vista also offers some unique features, such as Alta Vista's translation services and their image finder. They have consistently strived to provide a quality index, and a level of service beyond the scope of the normal search engine. Don't let them pass you up!