How does AltaVista work?
There is a comprehensive summary of how Alta Vista works. Probably the most relevant page for the purposes of site optimization is on link popularity. AltaVista values: • “Long pages rich in meaningful text”; • “Pages that serve as good hubs, with lots of links to pages that that have related content”; • “The connectivity of pages, including not just how many links there are to a page but where the links come from”; • “The level of the directory in which the page is found”. One criterion that makes AltaVista distinctive is that it gives additional value to pages that act as hubs. It also reiterates the likely advantage of separating important content into separate domains (and even placing content in the home directory). An AltaVista optimized site is likely to include hub pages for each significant group of search terms, linked from the home page.
