If you want to have a hugely successful web
site, you should do your level best to get into the first three
pages of as many search engines as possible. This article,
"Thoughts on Search Engines" is about understanding search engines
so that you can better utilize your time to reach your goal.
I wrote this issue so I hope that you enjoy it. Please let me
know what you think.
Search engines have three major components:
The first are software programs, with creepy names like
spiders, ants and bots, which crawl around the web and visit
web pages. These spiders then take that information to their
home base, which is the second category, the database or index.
This index, which is something like a catalog, contains a copy
of every single page that the spider brings back. When a
spider returns to your website and brings back the changes to
the catalog, it is updated. However, the reality is that in
many search engines, the index database does not contain all the
pages. Therefore, if you see in your tracking logs that a
spider has visited and requested certain pages, it is not always
a sure thing that those pages have been indexed. It is best to
search the search engine for your URLs in order to be sure that
you are indexed.
The third component is the Ranking mechanism. This is the
software that matches the web surfer's key words with the pages
in the database and comes up with matches. These matches are
then displayed on the surfer's screen. The higher you are
displayed in the surfer's window, the better your chances are
of being found. As stated earlier, 93% of Internet users do not
look past the first three pages of search results.
These are the common denominators among the different major search
engines. As the search engines are owned by different companies,
their spiders are tweaked differently. The following information about the behavior of spiders covers:
AltaVista, Excite (which also owns Web Crawler and Magellan), Fast
Search, Go (owned by Infoseek), Google, Lycos, Northern Light, Inktomi
(which influences the search results of HotBot, AOL Search, and MSN
Search).
THE SPIDERS
All the spiders "deep crawl", which means that they crawl several
layers into your website. The exception to this from the above listed
search engines is the spider of the search engine, Go.
Only Alta Vista "Instant Indexes", which means that the information
is put into the database of websites within days. All other search
engines take longer.
Excite Inktomi, Go and Lycos cannot crawl nor index frame pages.
Alta Vista, FAST, Northern Light can. It is possible to circumvent
the problems with framed pages of some search engines by using the <NOFRAMES> tag.
If you have an image map as one of your main pages for links to other
areas of your website, you will have problems indexing your pages
with the spiders of Excite, FAST, Google, Inktomi and Lycos. They
cannot follow the links in an image map. However, links in an
image map can be read and followed by spiders of the following
search engines: AltaVista, Go and Northern Light.
All robots will read your robot.txt page.
If you have Meta Robot Tags in your code all but Excite's spider can
read it. Google may not support checking it.
Work hard (and smart) to have as many well regarded websites linked
to yours, known as Link Popularity. Link Popularity is extremely
important because all search engines can determine how many links are
going to and from your page. Some decide to "index or not" based on
this attribute of your website. If you do this, then you will be
rewarded by the Inktomi and Lycos spider's deep crawling your website
and therefore indexing more of your pages. The powerful Inktomi, as
mentioned earlier, is the database behind AOL Search, HotBot and
MSN Search. Additionally, AltaVista, Excite, FAST, Google (very
important), Go, Inktomi, and Northern Light see this with the
rational that if there are many links connected to this page,
then it must be of more importance. This is becoming a popular
tweaking among the programming of many spiders.
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THE DATABASE AT THE HOMEBASE
All of the major search engines' databases will index the full
body text. There may be certain words missing that are called "stop"
words. These stop words are words that many spiders skip in order to
move faster. The spiders who do skip words belong to AltaVista,
Excite, Inktomi, Lycos and Google. FAST, Go and Northern Light's
spiders do not.
Concerning your meta tags, all search engines index Meta Keywords
except Excite, FAST, Google, Lycos and Northern Lights. Additionally,
all spiders will index Meta Descriptions with the exception of: FAST,
Google, Lycos and Northern Light.
If you have alt tags for your images on your pages that are being
indexed then, AltaVista, Go, Google and Lycos will read and index
them but Excite, FAST, Inktomi and Northern Light will not.
Any comment tags that you have in your web page code can only be
read by the spider of the northern California baby and powerhouse,
Inktomi.
RANKING
If you're hoping that your Meta Tags will boost your ranking for all
search engines, this is not the case. Although all major search
engines spiders read and index meta tags, only Go and Inktomi do give
a boost to meta tags. AltaVista, Excite, FAST, Google, Lycos and
Northern Light do not.
The important shift has been toward Link Popularity. Getting as many
links of good sites linking to yours is an important point with
AltaVista, Excite, FAST, Google (very important), Go, Inktomi, and
Northern Light.
Choose descriptive keywords to reflect the content. Have great
content and a really good TITLE and Meta Keyword Description that
entices people to click on your link when it comes up in a search,
then you win points with both HotBot and Lycos. You will be boosted
in rankings with those search engines. The height of the boost
depends on the number of people who click on your link.
One point to remember is that search engines, like most entities,
change. This information was current as of this summer (Northern
Hemisphere) changes in both climate and search
engine tweaking are in the air.
I hope that you have enjoyed this article.
Peter P. Thiruselvam
THE SHAMELESS COMPANY WEBSITE PLUG AREA
Hi, I'm Pete and I work
as the Editor of this newsletter and Editor-in-Chief of iEntry.com's
50 newsletters and growing. I work with an excellent staff of
writers, website creators, promoters, "The Chief", and other friends.
Come by and look at some of our other neat newsletters we create at
iEntry.Com
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We at the Editorial Team would like to thank all our readers for reading WebProNews.
We hope you find this information useful.
Peter Thiruselvam
Editor
The WebProNews Team
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