AltaVista actually publishes their criteria for ranking sites. While I am not sure how much of it reflects the actual practice to date, it is instructive to look at their documented criteria.
Update (17 June 2006): this article is no longer relevant to today's AltaVista. AltaVista has undergone numerous changes since this article was written in 4 April 2000, and probably no longer even uses the same engine as that described here. Please read my articles on Google Search Engine Ranking and More Tips on Google Search Engine Results Placement for current information on the search engine scene.
The AltaVista FAQ suggests a few things you should do in order to improve your web page's ranking. Here are a few of the important ones:
Back in the year 2000, there was an article on AltaVista describing how the keyword meta tag was rated by the search engine spider. That document has since been removed (or at least, I can't seem to find it any more). The document mentioned that the words in the keyword meta tag has the same value as the other words on the web page itself, except for one very important case: if your meta keyword tag contains keywords that do not occur in your main web page, your page will be penalized. The document went on to say that your ranking may improve if you use both the title tag and relevant first few lines in your web page without any meta keyword tag.
Today, that document has disappeared. What's left of it, a general FAQ, no longer even mentions the meta keywords tag. I have a suspicion that the keywords tag is no longer even indexed by the spider.
AltaVista mentions a few practices that it considers as search engine spam. You might want to avoid these on your page since AltaVista says that it will block sites practising such tricks. Here are some of the items mentioned in their FAQ.
AltaVista used to be one of the most popular search engines around in the late 1990s. Today, it's popularity has diminished somewhat, and is probably overtaken by Google. Nonetheless, since submission to the index is free, and many of the documented ranking criteria mentioned above are common criteria used by other search engines, it is still a good idea to take note of them when you design your site.
Copyright 2000-2002 by Christopher Heng. All rights reserved.
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