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Changes in
Search Engines
Search engines will be a major factor
in how well your site performs on the Web. They are also one of
the most frustrating and confusing parts of having a successful
website.
Search engines are essentially the
"yellow pages" of the web, and are constantly changing how they
accept and index sites. The reason they change their policies so
often is to provide the most relevant search results they can,
and to discourage companies who "cheat" for a better search
engine placement.
There have been many changes to the
search engine over the last few months, and I thought it would
be a good time to revisit the major ones.
The main change is the number of
search engines that accept free submissions is dwindling. I have
heard a lot of people complaining about this because the web is
supposed to be "free". When the web was developed, it was
intended to provide information quickly and for free. However,
as more and more businesses started doing business on-line, and
making money, it became a new advertising medium. You would
never ask the phone book or radio station to "list" your ad for
free. Why would you expect Yahoo! or Google to do it?
There are hundreds of search engines
and directories currently on the web. However, 5 of them are
responsible for about 93% of all web searches. Quite frankly,
many of the other search engines are there to gather your
contact information and then sell it.
As of the writing of this article
(April 2002, updated March 2006), the major search engines are:
Yahoo, Google, Netscape, Ask Jeeves, MSN, AOL, Open Directory
Project and Overture.
AOL, Netscape, and Ask Jeeves do not
accept submissions directly. Instead, they rely on other search
engines or directories to supply their search results. For
example: AOL and Netscape use Google, while Ask Jeeves uses
Yahoo.
Link popularity is based on the number
of RELEVANT links to and from your site. A search engine will
visit your site and count the number of links to and from it.
The more links you have, the higher your link popularity. The
catch is that the links must be relevant to your site and your
visitors. If you are selling wedding dresses, then links to a
florist, limo service, caterer would all be relevant. However, a
link to a bait shop or machine shop would not be. Non-relevant
links will actually lower your link popularity. Google is one
search engine that weighs link popularity very highly when
indexing a site. |
