Getting pertinent info from Search Engines
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| Here are the results. I submitted the page to the three search engines on Saturday 22nd of
November 1997, AltaVista said that it will be indexed within a day or two, HotBot promised
a 48 hour lag time, Infoseek said immediately. Well Infoseek's results were indeed
immediately available which was really cool cause I had a chance to see things as they
were fresh in my mind. HotBots results were available in less than 48 hours. AltaVista
however had no results for me and the page did not seem to be registered with them, so I
resubmitted. Checking back after 48 hours still did not show any results. A week later and
sure it did come up for some keywords. I only looked at the first 20 results (first 2 pages). If my page did turn up in later pages I did not check beyond 20.
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| S e a r c h P o s i t i o n | |||
| Search Phrase/ Engine Name | AltaVista | HotBot | Infoseek |
| mount everest | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| climbing mount everest | 1 | 4 | 14 |
| search ranking | 0 | 0 | 12 |
| placement and positioning | 2 | 0 | 5 |
| ranking secrets | 1 | 5 | 2 |
| traffic building | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| site visibility | 0 | 0 | 20 |
| high placement | 0 | 0 | 5 |
| visibility tools | 0 | 0 | 4 |
| good placement | 16 | 0 | 1 |
| top placing | 0 | 0 | 6 |
| webmasters visibility tools | 0 | 0 | 3 |
| Phrase in body of text | |||
| top ranking placement | 0 | 0 | 1 |
| anordnar konferenser | 1 | 20 | 20 |
| website traffic maximization | 0 | 2 | 0 |
| I told you not to waste your time here | 0 | 0 | 14 |
| My conclusions: I was surprised that the page did not show up when I did a search for "mount everest", it had the keywords in the title and plenty of it in the body of the page with 6 links to other pages pertinent to the subject. I would have thought it related more to "mount everest" than any of the pages put in first position by the 3 engines. As far as "site positioning" was concerned I really had tough competition from people who claim to be professionals specialising in putting pages on top of search engines and my keyword selection was not focused to a particular aspect. I was not duly surprised that it did not do too well with HotBot but rather taken aback that it did better than I expected with InfoSeek and AltaVista. I do not want to tamper with the original document but having submitted, I would need to refine it if I wanted to get a better positioning. I would have to narrow down the keywords to probably just a few, and give weight in the body of the page to those keywords. Inclusion of the keywords in the Title would also be my consideration as all three seem to give more weight to the title in my opinion. From the Engines I submitted to I liked Infoseek the best. It gave me the results instantly and the server speed was really excellent. The results were also more pertinent to the search. It also did find my document according to the keywords I choose. My next step is to contact the respective search engines for comments. Meanwhile if you are interested in pursuing the study further you are welcome to use the document and change a few parameters to examine the results. If you do so please email me so that we can keep track of developments and share our experiences. I have come across many sites some of them businesses on the Net who have resorted to spamming in order to get a prominent position. My reaction has been to keep away from them, by doing so they have really given themselves away in my opinion. |
| November 1998 Update Search engine rules and algorithms are constantly changing. If you came here through a search engine, it must have been Yahoo. The page as originally written will today get heavily penalized by almost all engines. It repeats the phrase "mount Everest" too often for their liking. Yahoo being a "Directory" and having a more personalized approach has obviously seen that my repetitions have not been intentional spamming. Today, if you want a prominent position with an engine, narrow the keywords just to one phrase (two words). Make a Title 5-10 words long with the keyword phrase close to the beginning. Give a 25-30 word description, highly descriptive, but do not repeat the keyword phrase. Example: Title: Views of Mount Everest in June Description: Breathtaking pictures taken at our last Everest expedition summer of 1998. Dispense with Keywords In your content use the graphic ALT tag to describe the pictures ( Mount Everest at dawn) (South view of Everest) etc. Do not repeat the phrase "Mount Everest" more than 4 times on the page, and Everest on its own not more than 6 times. Note added May 2003, the numbers given above are not absolute. Ranking very much depends on what other pages are also submitted. In some cases a 35% relevancy could get you on the first page. Whereas 85% could push you down to oblivion in other cases. You just have to experiment. But do not get frustrated. If you feel that your page provides pertinent information in a nice logical manner without intentional repetition, just leave it. You'll be surprised to see your page one day ranking on top. Bottom line advise: Do not try to outsmart the Engines, give accurate pertinent information nicely laid out. And that should really be why we put up a page in the first place. |
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