Search Engine Updates

Search Engine Updates

Lycos

Meta Description Tags: Not used, Lycos uses the first 141 characters of body text for your page summary.
Keyword Meta Tags: Lycos doesn't use meta keyword tags
Submission Speed: 1-5 weeks, updates usually around the 20^th to 28^th of the month
Multiple <Titles>: May work well at Lycos
<title>: Keywords are not required to be in the Title tags, but they are important. Synonyms are taken into account. Some pages have very large titles, so there doesn't appear to be penalties for this.
<!comment> tags: are not indexed.
alt text: Is indexed and is very useful to generate a good description for your page if placed early in the document.
Body Content: Put the most important keywords in the top of document and once close to the bottom or last paragraph. Start paragraphs with the keyphrase occasionally or have them occur close to the front of the paragraphs. Remember that the description will be made from the first part of the document.
Tail Tagging: Not useful.
Keywords: use one in the title, and one or two in the body text, make sure that you have one towards the very top of the page, preferably in the <h1> tag.
Invisible Text: very little hidden text spamdexing was observed in most cases.
Page Summary: Summary is taken from the first 250 characters of body text found at the top of the web page. It will use the text from the img .alt tag to provide description for your site if placed first on the page.
Domain Name: Alphabetically sensitive

And, as with most of the other SE's, one of the best pieces of advise that we can offer is to carefully analyze the search topic [keyword(s) / phrase(s)] that you want to appear in and closely study the HTML codes of the top pages in that particular search. Next, use the page code for a template and, by inserting your own information you are likely to be competitive in a Lycos search in that particular category.

Alta Vista

They rotate listings on a random basis
Title Tags: Your most important "keywords" MUST be included in your Title tags. AltaVista will only index the first 12 words or approx. 96 characters. Do not repeat your keywords.
Meta Description: Put important keywords towards the front of the description, AltaVista will only index what it will display, which is approx. 22 words or 154 characters. Seldom found in high scoring pages.
Meta Keyword Tags: will index approximately 1024 characters. Meta Keyword Tags are seldom found in the high scoring pages.
Image .alt text: is indexed, however not likely to be an effective technique and seldom were pages using this technique found in the top positions.
<! -- Comments -- >: are not indexed.
Spam Penalty: Heavy spam penalties now in effect, repetition of keywords (example: beer, beer, beer, beer) may cause your page to drop significantly.
Tail Tagging: Not used.
Keywords: Use one or two occurrences of each keyword in the document for best results. Use the keyword as a link description for example:
<a href="http://www.yourserver.com>keyword</a>
Vary Keyword Density: Since AltaVista is mixing pages, a smart strategy is to have multiple pages listed with varying keyword density.
Page Submission: We've had the best success getting pages indexed if we only submit one page from each domain per day. When we submitted 5-10 pages per day most of them were ignored except the first submission.

HotBot

HotBot Drops Old Pages

During the later part of August, HotBot dropped quite a few older pages from it's index, and at about the same time started actively spidering newly submitted pages again. Many new submissions are showing up within a day or so, which is a great improvement over last month's slowness. If you have lost pages in HotBot recently, make sure and resubmit them.

HotBot has been scoring pages highly that contain the keyword in the URL, like http://www.keyword.com or http://www.domain.com/keyword/keyword.html It appears that the having the keyword in the domain name carries slightly more weight than a subdirectory or filename. This technique is also effective on Excite.

Since Hot Bot forces their users to be very specific in order to turn up meaningful search results -- and for you to have a fighting chance to come up on top of their search list -- you will need to pay close attention to adding very specific keyword phrases when you design your pages for HotBot. In addition, HotBot is case sensitive so you may want to include alternative capitalization in your keywords or body text.

<META> keywords do affect your positioning on Hot Bot. You should use them, however, there is no evidence that repeating them will improve your page's position -- except for "lower case / upper case" repeats; (i.e. "Bed Breakfast" & "bed breakfast"). Most importantly, make sure that you include all of your pertinent keywords in your <META> keywords description just once.

<META> descriptions are used by Hot Bot for the summary. Be sure to put your "summary" in the meta description to "force" Hot Bot to meaningfully describe your site. Otherwise, it will grab the first words on your page to use as the summary. Unlike other SE's that only use Meta descriptions found after the <TITLE> tag, Hot Bot uses them regardless of whether they are placed before or after the <TITLE> tags. However, in order to maintain consistency with your page designs, we recommend that you place your meta's AFTER your <title> tags... this way they will work for all SE's that use <meta>'s.

Remember: It is important to use both the meta keyword and the meta description tag together. HotBot appears to ignore meta keyword tags if used without the meta description.

Here's an interesting trick somewhat unique to Hot Bot. If you have registered the same page twice with a different URL, Hot Bot may list the second registered URL as an "alternate" and it will take up a position on the search page that is returned. This means that if your page takes the, say, #9 position -- your "alternate" will take the #10 position. This is important if you are in the top ten on a search because it means that you can "bump" your competition down on the list by registering the same page two different ways. Example: "http//yourdomain.com" and "http://yourdomain.com/index.html" are actually the same URL address returning the same page... but by registering it two different ways, you can take an extra position on the search engine -- and, theoretically, you have two more opportunities to register this same page by using the "www" in each of the above URL's. That would expand this page's presence & positions to four spaces in the search.

For your information, Hot Bot ALSO frequently lists "similar" pages with unique URL's as alternates... even when the pages are slightly different -- with the same end result. This is good if you are high in the search... it is almost useless to you if you are anywhere outside the Top 20.

In summary... META tags are extremely important to Hot Bot... be sure to use the "description" as well as the "keyword" meta's in order to give your page(s) a chance to be returned high on a HotBot search.

Keyword density is also important to Hot Bot. Many top pages are short on words and laden with image links. By making your images the links to the other pages on your site, you maintain (increase) keyword density while refraining from "diluting" your page with words that are not "supportive" to the central theme of your web page.

Northern Light

Northern Light will index:

The first 12 (approx. 83 characters) within the <title> tag
Words outside of the <title> tags but within the <head> and </head> section of a page
Words within the <body> text
Words that describe a link: for example <a href="www.yourserver.com">keyword</a>

Northern Light doesn't index:

Words in the image .alt tag
Dublin core meta data (The Dublin core meta data is a new set of meta tags that have been gaining popularity in libraries and universities. This tag set is still under development and is seldom used at this time with the large Internet Search Engines.)
Hidden input form data (like trick #13)
Text within a URL link: for example - <a href="http://www.yourserver.com/keyword.html>
Words in the <meta> http-equiv tag
Words within  tags

Title Tags: Your most important "keywords" should be included in your Title tags
Meta Tags: Not used. Northern Light says that they make "note" of meta tags, but don't use them for descriptions or for increased relevancy of the page.
Spam Penalty: None observed
Tail Tagging: was found in several top rated pages.
Keywords: Place relevant keywords frequently throughout the body text of your document.
Hidden Text: Northern Light doesn't penalize for using the same color text as the background.

Excite

Meta description tag now supported!

Excite started supporting the meta description tag during the first of September. This tag can now be used to format your summary description. We have confirmed that Excite will not index the text in the meta description tag, it is only used in controlling your description. So do not use that text when calculating your keyword density.

During August we heard rumors that Excite is only accepting upper level domain (root domain) submissions for indexing. We now have an official confirmation that this is indeed true.

Excite, unlike most of the other search engines, does not require your keyword(s) in your <title>. This makes it easier to score under multiple keywords.

Excite definitely gives preference to pages that have the keyword in the URL. For example, if your keyword is "hawaii," then you will get a bonus if you use it in your URL like this http://www.hawaii.com/hawaii/hawaii-tours.html.

We have also seen usage of multiple <title> tags that were used with pages that had virtually no text in the page at all, that did very well. Don’t start your title text line with the keyword as the first word, we found it works better if it's the third or fourth word in the text.

Excite does not index or use your web page's <META> keyword tag. Excite will simply ignore the Meta's keyword and index your page(s) according to the Excite criteria.

Most importantly, Excite is looking for keywords in "viewable" portion of your web page! -- Put your page creation efforts into the following areas.

Keywords in Links
Keywords in Headlines
Keywords in Body text
Keywords in Title

Another Tip: Excite understands synonyms of your keywords, so make use of them to avoid spamdexing penalties.

Excite attaches decreasing weight to each repetition of a word, so it doesn't do much good to repeat the keyword over and over anywhere in the body text...

If the web site visitor cannot see the text, then Excite ignores it. This includes META's, comments, and .alt text.

WebCrawler

WebCrawler is owned by Excite and is obviously using a very similar ranking criteria when compared to Excite. Use the same techniques for WebCrawler as for Excite.

Yahoo
things that we have observed that influence scoring at Yahoo

Keywords in the domain name and file name.
Keywords in the title.
Maybe a listing in the Yahoo directory. We tended to see listings of sites that don't normally score high in HotBot, but score high on Yahoo/Inktomi. One of the reasons may be that they seeded this database with urls that were already included in the Yahoo directory.

Yahoo is not a "keyword driven" search engine. Yahoo is a CATALOG!!! Yahoo does not list web sites with any regard to the keyword content of your web page. Fact is, Yahoo does not even index your page at all -- they only index the name of your company and the brief site description that you give them at the time that you submit.

Infoseek

Infoseek will index:

The first 10 (approx. 69 characters) within the <title> tag.
The first 105 words (762 characters) in the Meta Keyword tag.
Words outside of the <title> tags but within the <head> and </head> section of a page.
Words that occur before the <html> tag at the very top of the document.
Words that are between the <html> tag and the <head> tag.
Words within the <body> text.
Words that describe a link: for example <a href="www.yourserver.com">keyword</a>.
The first 34 Words (246 characters) in the <meta> description tag.
The text directly after the <option> tag inside a <form> tag set.

Infoseek doesn't index:

Words in the image .alt tag.
Dublin core meta data (The Dublin core meta data is a new set of meta tags that have been gaining popularity in libraries and universities . This tag set is still under development and is seldom used at this time with the large Internet Search Engines.) Note: The search engine that Infoseek sells does have some options that deal with Dublin Core data, so in the future this meta data may be indexed.
Hidden input form data (like trick #13).
Text within a URL link: for example - <a href="http://www.yourserver.com/keyword.html>.
Words in the <meta> http-equiv tag.
Words within  tags.

Meta Tags: Supported – The first 105 words or 762 characters of your meta keyword tag will get indexed. Only 34 words or 246 characters will get indexed in the meta description tags.
Avg. Submission Speed: 1-3 days
Index Lag Time: 3 weeks until they "re-check" your site... supposedly
Spam Penalty: Yes – many…
Submission Status Check: Yes
Submission Quantity Penalty: Don't submit more than approximately 50 pages in a day's time. Wait a while before submitting more, if you are in a hurry to submit a large number of pages, use the email feature.
Multiple <Titles>: Don't use.
<title>: May not be important after most recent change.
alt text: Not supported, Infoseek will not index this information.
Age Preference: Newly submitted pages have a slight preference.
<!comment> tags: Does not index.
Content: Content best sandwiched between hypertext links.
Tail Tagging: Don't use - may get you banned if Infoseek inspects.
Keywords: Best in title, hyperlink descriptions, and in general towards the top of the page. Infoseek recognizes and scores pages higher with synonyms.
Invisible Text: Pages with EXACT same colors may be rejected. Pages with invisible text may be removed if they are inspected manually by Infoseek's personnel
Redirect pages: NOT supported, the meta refresh tag will cause a spam penalty and not take the page submission. Server redirects cause the final page to be indexed, without a penalty.
Keyword Concentration in <BODY> text: .67-2%

Odds & Ends - taken directly from Infoseek's "Guidelines for Adding a Web Page"

Pages containing adult-oriented content may be submitted through electronic mail only. This process may take from 7-10 days, or longer.
A single URL may only be submitted once in a 24-hour period.
Infoseek reserves the right to restrict automated or robotic submissions through the Add URL feature.
Infoseek reserves the right to remove or exclude pages from its index at any time.
Infoseek's spider is programmed to avoid the indexing of Web pages that employ common spamming practices.

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