The Latest Insights into Search Engine Marketing

Jan 2
04:05

2024

David Gikandi

David Gikandi

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The landscape of search engine marketing is in a constant state of flux. New technologies, rules, and challenges emerge regularly, making it crucial for website owners to stay updated. This knowledge is vital for ensuring your website ranks well in search engine indexes, which is a significant source of traffic for most sites. This article will delve into the latest developments in various search engines and how you can leverage this information for your marketing advantage.

Unique IP Addresses for Each Site

It's advisable to use unique domain names and IP addresses for your doorways. Occasionally,The Latest Insights into Search Engine Marketing Articles you might overuse certain gateway pages (doorways, information frames, etc.) to achieve higher placements on search engines. This could lead to duplicate pages or a cluster of high rankings for the same keyword, which search engines like AltaVista are vigilant about. Penalties for such errors could range from penalizing the offending page to blocking new submissions from the offending site.

To prevent such mistakes from negatively impacting your website, consider getting a unique domain name with its own IP address. It's also beneficial to have two domain names - one for your site and one for your web promotion material such as doorways. For maximum effect, these domains should be hosted by different hosting services to ensure each domain name has a unique IP address.

Submitting to Search Engines

When submitting to major search engines, it's recommended to only submit your home pages and hallway pages (pages containing links to all your site's pages). Allow the search engine to crawl and find your other pages. Ensure you wait at least 30 minutes between each submission and submit these pages manually using the search engine's submission page.

Infoseek Submission

Infoseek's Add URL function is now operational after a period of downtime. However, it now takes about 5 - 7 weeks for newly submitted sites to get indexed. It also only accepts submissions for the home page and not any other subpage.

Excite Delays and Subdirectories Issue

Excite is currently the slowest of the major engines when it comes to indexing new pages. It's recommended to submit your site as usual and re-submit every fortnight. Excite also seems to favor pages in the root directory over those in subdirectories.

Lycos and Hotbot Tips

To get into Lycos, submit your site to Lycos and www.dmoz.org, the Open Directory Project that Lycos and many other engines use as a source of results on certain searches. Hotbot, on the other hand, is known to drop pages off their index without any apparent reason.

AltaVista "Too many URLs problem"

AltaVista recently installed an aggressive spam filter which has been causing problems for many web site owners. The filter often incorrectly tags many pages as spam.

DirectHit, LookSmart and Open Directory Project Submissions

Several search engines such as HotBot and Lycos use DirectHit and the Open Directory Project as a major source of their search results. It's beneficial to submit your site directly to DirectHit and the Open Directory Project.

Automatic Submission Tools

Automatic submission tools are extremely useful and time-saving when it comes to submitting your site to several hundred search engines and directories. However, avoid using them for Infoseek and AltaVista if you are submitting more than one page.

Final Note: Delayed Index Updates

Most of the major engines are now taking between 30 and 90 days to refresh their databases, although their information pages claim shorter periods.

For more information on this topic, please visit the Additional Resources section.