AltaVista policies, problems and attitude!

AltaVista has apparently decided that it is Judge, Jury and Executioner for it's search engine and for web sites submitted to it. While they may have the right to act this way, they also have a obligation to do so responsibly. I believe that there are three areas of responsibility that AltaVista has here.

FIRST: Policy creation. Any policies made should be carefully evaluated as to whether the policy appropriately addresses the situation (problem, issue, concern, etc.) and what the ramifications are of implementing the policy. And, the policy should include provisions allowing those affected by this policy to ask for a timely and impartial review; both for how the policy was applied to them and of the appropriateness policy itself.

SECOND: Policy implementation. Anyone who will be involved with this policy, should be adequately trained both in how to apply the policy and in all the ramifications of the policy. more information coming.

THIRD: Policy Enforcement should be fairly and equitably applied. more information coming.

Chronology

Starting in February

About February 20th, AltaVista decided that my mirror site was spamming their index. Without any notification or warning they "BLOCKED" the whole domain name for spamming. This affected 4 other unrelated web sites hosted under this domain (1ie.com). Because there was no notification regarding this, I did not know why ALL the index records for this domain, and the 5 sites using it, disappeared from AltaVista's index.
Much more coming about the many phone calls and emails it took to get this straightened out. I finally had to start writing emails to the CEO of AltaVista.
Finally resolved on 6/26, when the site was removed from the spamming list and started to be re-indexed.

Nov. - Mar 2000 Counters are low, as Hitometer had problems
and didn't record correctly. IE: Feb should be at least 5719.
This is based on their counter vs their statistics (graph).
Hits 1999