Re: A Question on Search Engines

From: Tamra Heathershaw-Hart <tamra_at_hcstudios.com>
Date: Tue 07 Aug 2001 12:16:14 -0500

JOHN SCHULTZ <marketing_at_webmasterbids.com> WROTE:

> Is there any way, besides purchasing keywords on
> goto.com, to get your search engine submissions to show
> up quickly on the search engines?

<snip>

> Maybe I'm exaggerating the time but it sure seems to me
> like there's a HUGE delay between the time you submit
> something and the time it appears in the listings.
> Any suggestions?

Yes, there are a few things you can do to speed up the
process, but these days they all seem to cost money.

First, a bit of an overview of timing. Inktomi is
reindexing about every 48 hours (for the pay-to-reindex
sites). FAST and Google are reindexing about once a
month. Excite doesn't seem to reindex any more at all
(although there was a new index about a month ago).
AltaVista seems to be back on a monthly reindex, except
for their subscription pay-to-reindex sites, which are
updated weekly.

The first thing I always suggest is to get a listing in
LookSmart ($299, the price just went up recently) if you
don't have one already. It takes only a couple of days
to get into the directory, and usually within two weeks
those listings are integrated into *most* of the other
search engines that use LS results (such as MSN search).
LookSmart listings use a description written by the
editors, so it won't necessarily match your meta tags,
but if you're lucky (and have good text on your site)
it should be a fair description that gets you some
traffic. Being in LS means that in the search engines
that use both Inktomi results and LS listings, you
have a chance to get a double whammy and show up with
two listings near the top, with the Inktomi one being
refreshed/updated regularly.

The second thing is to sign up for the subscription
pay-for-reindexing, currently being done by Inktomi
and AltaVista. Google is supposedly introducing it soon
as well. Pricing for Inktomi and AltaVista reindexing
depends on the number of pages you sign up for. Ink has
a one-year subscription, AV is 6 months and more
expensive, but both may be worth it to you. Inktomi's
results in particular are used by a large amount of
search sites.

Once you've done those two things, then think about
GoTo and other pay-per-click sites. GoTo's results are
used on a lot of search engines, but it's usually only
the top 3 or so listings that show up so buying GoTo
spots will only work if you're willing to pay for one
of the top spots -- and for some keywords, that's a lot
of money per click. But you can change your descriptive
text at GoTo fairly easily, and those changes usually
show up in the GoTo partner sites fairly quickly.

As far as getting Google to reindex your site and update
the listings, the best way to get reindexed by Google
is to let its spider find you. So, in your newsletter
postings that get archived, put your URL in your .sig
and when that issue gets archived, submit that page to
Google. (Ahem...but only if you won't be causing any
problems for the newsletter site by doing so, of
course!) Or, get a mention of your site in an online
news source and make sure they link to your site, then
submit that page. Heck -- get your mom to link to your
site from her site and submit that if you have to! Also,
if you're going the direct route, either submit your
home page or a site map, and let Googlebot find its way
from there (don't ask me why that's more effective that
submitting the page you want updated, but it is).

Of course, I'm assuming that you're reading your log
files (or site stats reports) on a regular basis and
know if spiders are actually coming to your site. If
no SE spiders have been to your site in a while, or if
they never get past the home page, you may have a
different problem from simply getting reindexed in the
search engine. For example, you might have a robots.txt
file on the server that's barring spiders, or your site
may be dynamically generated and use ? in the urls which
keeps some spiders out, or you may have changed your
site so it's now all in Frames and most spiders can't
follow frameset links so they get stuck at the home page,
and so on. So, do check and see if any spiders have made
it to your site recently before doing anything else.

Good luck! And don't feel too bad if your site listings
don't get updated for another 6 months -- if you read
some of searchengineforums.com you'll see that that problem
is the norm, not the exception.

Tamra Heathershaw-Hart
Link Diva & Site Optimizer

HC Studios: Web Design * Promotion * Engineering
http://www.hcstudios.com/ | tamra@hcstudios.com
Phone: 503-399-4774 | Fax: 888-365-6949 (toll-free)



Received on Tue Aug 07 2001 - 12:16:14 CDT