"I told him I was about to post a web site and I wanted to run some stuff by him, to be sure I did not do anything wrong. Specifically, I told him I wanted to use doorway pages and asked if that was ok. He told me that the use of doorway pages is fine, AND EVEN liked, by Altavista. This is because doorway pages can lead to better, more specific search results. I told him that I only had links from my doorway page to my home page. He said that should not matter. In terms of spamming, they look for too many keywords on a page (as in excessive repetition and same color text) and for misleading keywords that do not match the content of the page. We talked about the submission problem, and the numerous complaints on the "Stop the Spammers" message board about the problematic submissions. He said he did not know and that they are looking into this.

In addition to the above, I've seen several postings by AltaVista representatives who claim the "too many submissions" error and the dropped sites are a result of their crack-down on spamming with their definition of spam being very broad. Here's one of the more detailed e-mails:

"AltaVista's goal is to provide you with the most relevant results when you search. In order to maintain the integrity of the search index and provide relevant search results, we must sometimes exclude submissions that engage in techniques designed to manipulate the search results.

Examples of such manipulation include, but are not limited to, the following:

• 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,
• 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,
• machine-generated pages with minimal or no content, whose sole purpose is to get a user to click to another page,
• pages that contain only links to other pages, or
• pages whose primary intent is to redirect users to another page.

AltaVista strives to deliver search results that provide accurate information about the content of Web pages.

Accordingly, we reserve the right to remove and/or to disable links to a Web site or Web page to which AltaVista has determined, in its sole discretion, that improper steps have been taken to manipulate AltaVista's search results. If you have any questions or concerns about this policy or its implementation, please contact us by e-mail at: spam-support@av.com.

--------------------------------------------------

Based on the above e-mail, you'd think that it is wrong to even want to design your page to be ranked well by AltaVista! However, this is NOT the case. For example, their FAQs include many tips on how to improve your visibility and rankings on AltaVista. Therefore, optimizing your pages to rank better on AltaVista is NOT wrong, despite all the rhetoric about spamming. However, in the case of AltaVista, there are right ways and wrong ways to optimize your pages.

                 ← What is this?

---