Main Search Engines and Directories
Getting Listed with AltaVista (1.1% YTD - 7.9% 2000 Market Share)
Time to Index: Approximately 8-12 days (although it has been slow lately)
Lastest Known Update to Index: April17, 2000
Latest News: 4/12 - New process now eliminates "auto-submission" programs from submitting to AltaVista.
How AltaVista works: AltaVista actually returns results from 4 different sources. The first is from their index, which is what most users would consider the main results. Additionally, AltaVista can also return results from Ask Jeeves, RealNames and the LookSmart Directory (see other search engines for more information on these).
"Ask AltaVista" responds to queries in Natural Language, using the Ask Jeeves results.
What AltaVista Wants
Title: 79 characters
Keyword in Title: Important - especially at the beginning
Description Meta Tag: 148 characters, supported
Keyword Meta Tag: Supported, but research has shown it can hurt your submission
Redirect Meta Tag: Seen as SPAM, penalized
Robot Meta Tag: Supported (NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW)
What does it index?: Title, meta keyword, meta description, All visible text, text in <style> tag, <no frames> content, ALT text, Link Text (higher score), ASP files,
Case Sensitive Search: Yes
Keyword in Domain?: Yes, use third-level domains (i.e. http://keyword.domain.com/)
Link Popularity: Yes
Submission Notes
AltaVista suggests only submitting one page from your site via the Add URL page. From there, AltaVista will crawl and index your page. Remember, this is a suggestion, not a rule. Using the Add URL page is a way to ensure individual pages are included in the index.
AltaVista will only accept 1 - 2 submissions per site per day. Others may be rejected.
AltaVista has several International versions. These are mirror sites, so submitting to the main site includes you in all.
Pages added via the Add URL page will generally appear in 8 - 12 days, but other pages in your site will take a month or more to appear.
Keyword stuffing, submitting too many pages from the same URL, submitting identical pages, meta refresh tags, irrelevant keywords and hidden text are all considered spamming and will be penalized
Keywords in titles, metatags and body text all add to a site's relevancy. AltaVista generally likes longer pages and gives preference to root level pages.
AltaVista supports Frames.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Getting Listed with AOL Search/NetFind (9.0% YTD - 2.1% 2000 Market Share)
Time to Index: Approximately two weeks.
Important Info: AOL's Search is driven by the ODP (The Open Directory Project). You must list your site in the ODP in order to be listed with AOL. It normally takes 5-10 days FOLLOWING your listing in the ODP to show up in AOL's index. The ODP has human editors (volunteer) and it can take as long as a month for the editor to review your submission. You can get multiple listings in the ODP - just make sure the additional listings go to different editors.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Getting Listed with Excite (2.8% YTD - 5.6% 2000 Market Share)
Time to Index: Approximately 1-5 months.
Last Known Update to Index: April 8, 2001
Latest News: Excite@Home just had another round of layoffs.
How Excite Works: Like most other search engines, Excite includes a directory. Excite also provides results for Netscape's and AOL Netfind's search pages. These results used to be identical to Excite's, but recently, AOL's results have been slightly different. Excite's spider crawls the web every 3 weeks. Don't be surprised if all your pages suddenly disappear from Excite. This happens to almost everyone. They should reappear in 3 weeks when the spider visits your site again.
What Excite Wants
Title: 71 characters
Keyword in Title: Important - especially at the beginning
Description Meta Tag: 390 characters, supported
Keyword Meta Tag: Not supported
Redirect Meta Tag: Seen as SPAM, penalized
Robot Meta Tag: Not Supported
What does it index?: Title, meta description, All visible text, <no frames> content, Link Text (higher score), ASP files,
Case Sensitive Search: No
Keyword in Domain?: Yes, use third-level domains (i.e. http://keyword.domain.com/)
Link Popularity: Yes
Submission Notes
Excite can recognize synonyms, so try to supplement main keywords with similar words
Excite should come and spider your site 3 to 4 weeks after you submit your page
Excite cannot navigate through image maps, so make sure there are text links into your site if you want the entire site indexed.
Keyword stuffing, excess repetition and irrelevant are all considered spamming and will be penalized
Keywords in titles and body text all add to a site's relevancy.
Site popularity adds to a site's relevance.
Excite seems to favor shorter pages where the keywords are prominent.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Getting Listed with Google (16.5% YTD - 5.5% 2000 Market Share)
Time to Index: Approximately two weeks.
Last Known Update: April 30, 2001
Latest News: Continues to gain market share steadily.
How Google Works: Google has been gaining popularity throughout 2000, and they got a big boost when they started providing Yahoo! with their "web pages" results in July 2000.
According to their site, The Google directory integrates Google's sophisticated search technology with Open Directory pages to create the most useful tool for finding information on the web. Google has an active spider that will crawl your web site and follow hyperlinks so they suggest you only submit the top-level page from your site. Google stores many web pages in its cache to retrieve for users as a back-up in case the page's server temporarily fails.
What Google Wants
Title: 83 characters
Keyword in Title: Important - especially at the beginning
Description Meta Tag: Not supported
Keyword Meta Tag: Not supported
Redirect Meta Tag: Seen as SPAM, penalized
Robot Meta Tag: Supported (NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW)
What does it index?: Title, All visible text, <no frames> content, ALT text, Link Text (higher score), ASP files,
Case Sensitive Search: No
Keyword in Domain?: Yes, use third-level domains (i.e. http://keyword.domain.com/)
Link Popularity: Yes, a major influence
Submission Notes
Google is case sensitive
Google doesn't use the meta description tag for the page summary in the search results. It displays the text around the keyword from the document source and highlights the keyword.
RealNames "Internet Keywords" links are incorporated at Google, but only for exact search matches
Google's searches are "exact" (boolean "and")... otherwise, all of your search words have to be found in the document to show up
Google caches your page content on their server and makes it available through the "Show Matches" link in the search results
Google will list a URL even if it hasn't spidered the page, they are the ones that you see in search results that don't have a regular title, summary or the "Show Matches" link
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Getting Listed with GoTo.com (3.1% YTD - 2.3% 2000 Market Share)
Time to Index: Less than one week after opening an account.
Be very careful and understand that their statistics of "queries" in their keyword suggestion tool can be unreliable. In our testing we have seen the numbers inflated in every keyword we have tracked. In one case, a keyword which received 3,200 queries the month before generated zero traffic to our site over a five week period when we held the #1 ranking.
Latest News: With GoTo.com's new partners (AltaVista, HotBot, Lycos, etc. having a GoTo.com account is vital).
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Getting Listed with HotBot (2.1% YTD - 3.09% 1999 Market Share)
Time to Index: Approximately four - eight weeks.
Lastest Update to Inktomi Results: March 29, 2001
Lastest Update to Direct Hit Results: March 30, 2001
Latest News: Uses the Inktomi database. Don't submit through their free submit service - use the paid service through PositionTech.com.
How HotBot Works: Hotbot was bought by Lycos in Fall of 1998. Originally it was powered by Inktomi, but recently, it's top 10 results have been provided by Direct Hit. It's directory comes from the Open Directory project.
What HotBot Wants
Title: 111 characters
Keyword in Title: Important - especially at the beginning
Description Meta Tag: 181 characters, supported
Keyword Meta Tag: Supported
Redirect Meta Tag: Seen as SPAM, penalized
Robot Meta Tag: Not Supported
What does it index?: Title, meta keyword, meta description, All visible text, <no frames> content, ALT text, ASP files,
Case Sensitive Search: Yes
Keyword in Domain?: Yes, use third-level domains (i.e. http://keyword.domain.com/)
Link Popularity: Yes
Submission Notes
Pages submitted to Hotbot are supposed to appear within 2 weeks, but actual performance varies greatly
Inktomi will spider your site, but needs text links to crawl inside the site as it can't read image maps
Hotbot will accept up to 50 URL's per day
Keyword stuffing, hidden text, irrelevant keywords and submitting identical pages are considered spamming and will be penalized
Keywords in titles, metatags and body text all add to a sites relevancy
Site popularity adds to a site's relevance as Direct Hit actively monitors site popularity and these are the top 10 results in Hotbot.
Hotbot seems to favor shorter pages where the keywords are prominent.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Getting Listed with Infoseek/Go Network (0.0% YTD - 3.3% 2000 Market Share)
By CBS.MarketWatch.com
Last Update: 11:50 PM ET Jan 28, 2001
NEW YORK (CBS.MW) -- Walt Disney is preparing to overhaul its loss-making Internet operations, a move likely to involve job cuts and the abandonment of its Go.com portal, the Financial Times reported on its Web site late Sunday. Company officials refused to comment, but in an FT interview Disney's executives revealed their concerns about the difficulty of making money from the portal business model.
"The advertising community has abandoned the internet," said Michael Eisner, group chairman and CEO of Disney (DIS: news, msgs) . "If a portal becomes only a search [engine] and directory, then a portal may not be what we want."
Until a few weeks ago, Eisner had said he intended to stand behind Disney's Internet investments, such as Go.com.
A retreat by one of the earliest traditional media groups to invest in Web-based operations would follow others this year: Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. (NWS: news, msgs) , CNN, the news network owned by AOL Time Warner (AOL: news, msgs) , and The New York Times (NYT: news, msgs) have slashed hundreds of online jobs as part of cost-cutting moves at their dot-com operations.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Getting Listed with Lycos (2.1% YTD - 3.4% 2000 Market Share)
Time to index: about five weeks.
Last Known Update to Index: February 20, 2001
Latest News: Their market share is shrinking.
Switched to Fast for their advanced search features. Make sure you are listed with Fast (All the Web).
How Lycos Works: The big question in the Search Engine industry was, "What's happening to Lycos?". The index hadn't added any new sites since July 1998. Then, for a brief time early this Spring, they were accepting again. Finally, in April, Lycos announced they were going to move towards being an Internet Directory (similar to Yahoo) using the Open Directory and most of it's search returns now come from this directory. The existing index will still provide secondary results. Lycos says they will continue to spider the web, but results have been very inconsistent.
What Lycos Wants
Title: 61characters
Keyword in Title: Important
Description Meta Tag: 390 characters, supported
Keyword Meta Tag: Not Supported
Redirect Meta Tag: Seen as SPAM, penalized
Robot Meta Tag: Supported (NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW)
What does it index?: Title, All visible text, text in <style> tag, <no frames> content, ALT text, Link Text (higher score), ASP files,
Case Sensitive Search: No
Keyword in Domain?: Yes, use third-level domains (i.e. http://keyword.domain.com/)
Link Popularity: Yes
Submission Notes
It's very important to be listed in the Open Directory
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Getting Listed with MSN (11.7% YTD - 8.9% 2000 Market Share)
Time to Index: Approximately one week.
Last Known Update to Index: Unknown
Latest News: Get into Inktomi through their paid service to get listed in less than a week.
How MSN Works: MSN Search went live in October, 1998 and has quickly become a major factor. It does feature a directory and it's search results are powered by Inktomi, the same engine used by Hotbot, among others.
Submission Notes
Because MSN is a Inktomi powered service, relevancy and spamming rules are similar to Hotbot and other Inktomi engines.
You're only to submit one page from your site via the Add URL page.
Keyword stuffing, submitting identical pages, irrelevant keywords and hidden text are all considered spamming and will be penalized
Keywords in titles, metatags and body text all add to a sites relevancy. Remember, not all Inktomi sites will rank your page the same, as they all have slightly different relevancy rules.
MSN does have a directory component, like most engines, but you can't suggest a site for it. It's compiled totally at the discretion of it's editors.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Getting Listed with Northern Light (0.6% YTD - 0.5% 2000 Market Share)
Time to Index: Approximately three weeks.
Latest News: None
What Northern Light Wants
Title: 77 characters
Keyword in Title: Important - especially at the beginning
Description Meta Tag: Not supported
Keyword Meta Tag: Not supported
Redirect Meta Tag: Seen as SPAM, penalized
Robot Meta Tag: Not Supported
What does it index?: Title, All visible text, text in <style> tag, <no frames> content, Link Text (higher score), ASP files,
Case Sensitive Search: Yes
Keyword in Domain?: Yes, use third-level domains (i.e. http://keyword.domain.com/)
Link Popularity: Yes
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Getting Listed with The Open Directory Project - ODP (5.7% YTD - 5.0 2000 Market Share)
Time to Index: Approximately two weeks.
Latest News: AOL Search, HotBot, Lycos and Netscape all use ODP is some form for their search criteria.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Getting Listed with Snap - NBCi (0.8% YTD - 2.8% 2000 Market Share)
Time to Index: Approximately two weeks.
Latest News: Losing market share and rumored to be shut down officially soon.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Getting Listed with WebCrawler (1.3% YTD - 0.7% 2000 Market Share)
Time to Index: Approximately five weeks.
Last Known Update to Index: March 5, 2001
Latest News: Making a small comeback.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Getting Listed with Yahoo! (40.0% YTD - 52.1% 2000 Market Share)
Time to Index: Approximately six weeks.
Latest News: Discontinued their free submission for commercial sites. You will need to pay the $199 Business Express Submission service.
How Yahoo! Works: Yahoo! is the Grand Daddy of directories and search services on the Net, and it's still the most popular. Yahoo! does not accept free submissions for commercial sites. You must pay to be included in the directory.
Submission Notes
Yahoo! is a human edited directory
Yahoo! won't review incomplete or under construction sites
Yahoo! only includes a link to one page of your site, usually your home page The way your site ranks depends on the information you fill out in Yahoo's online "Suggest a Site" form
Because your site isn't indexed, frames, metatags and other things that are important in other search engines play no part with Yahoo!
Yahoo! does NOT index the contents of your page and they don't care about "keywords". They only index the name of your company and the brief description you give them at the time you submit.
You must have full contact information - company name, address, phone number and e-mail listed on EACH page
A Privacy Statement is highly recommended
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Smaller Search Engines and Directories
Anzwers Inktomi Search Engine - we believe their Add URL submission is blocked
AskJeeves (0.32% 1999 Market Share) Just aquired Direct Hit
BigFoot (0.01% 1999 Market Share)
Canada.com Inktomi Search Engine -- gets you into Yahoo! fast
Direct Hit -- Ranks sites how often surfers click on the listing and how long they stay at the web site.
EuroSeek (0.05% 1999 Market Share)
FAST - (0.1%) 300 million indexed pages make it the largest index on the web
ICQ
InfoSpace (0.02% 1999 Market Share)
LookSmart (0.88% 1999 Market Share)
Mamma (0.33% 1999 Market Share)
NetGuide (0.06% 1999 Market Share)
Year-to-date Market Share statistics provided by StatMarket
|
