Meet the Search Engines!
Search Engine Strategies 2001 Conference
August 16-17, San Francisco


In Part 1 of this article, the representatives from FAST and
Inktomi discussed their search engines. Now, let's move to
announcements by the AltaVista and Google reps.

AltaVista

AltaVista's rep, Chris Kermoian, relayed the engine's view on
ranking: "If you have the most useful and most popular site on a
particular topic, AltaVista will do its best to make sure your
site is #1." AltaVista receives 200 million unique queries every
month.

Key elements of ranking in AltaVista are:

* Content that is useful and unique.
* Placement of content on the page. Use "newspaper" style
placement. Text at the top of the page is generally assigned
greater weight than text at the bottom of the page.
* Title tags. The page title is critical.
* Keyword and description META tags.
* Link popularity, with links coming from valuable sites.
Artificial links are considered spam. Anchor text should
accurately describe the page's content.

How can you get into AV's index?

* Regular spider run by AV's crawler.
* Basic free submit takes 4-6 weeks, of which 90 percent of these
submissions are considered spam. Tip: In AV's submission
"puzzle," using the letter "O" or the zero "0" will both work, if
you can't tell which they're asking for. Same thing with the
number "1" and the lower-case L "l."
* Express inclusion is ideal for small and mid-sized sites with
under 500 pages. Weekly updates for six months are included.
Ranking of pages are updated each week, so changes made to pages
are quickly seen in the search results. For more information,
visit: http://www.altavista.com/sites/search/express_incl
* Trusted Feed is a new program especially for large sites where
Web pages are provided to AV in XML feed format. This service
offers detailed online reporting capabilities. All pages
submitted through Trusted Feed are monitored for spam. This
program solves many issues such as dynamic content and framed
pages. For more information, visit:
http://www.altavista.com/sites/search/trustedfeed

Does AltaVista assign more relevancy to pages that have been in
their index for a while? According to Kermoian, no. He also
stated that participating in their inclusion programs doesn't
have a special effect on rankings either.


Google

Daniel Dulitz with Google said that Google's mission is to
organize all the information they can find and make it useful to
everyone.

Facts about Google:

* Google boosts 1.3 billion Web pages now, making it the world's
largest search engine.
* Google offers 60 interface languages.
* Google crawls the Web every 28 days, but it takes a little
additional time for pages to appear in the index. It crawls some
sites more often.
* Google offers PDF searches, an image search in beta, and
searches by date.

Interesting Note: Google crawls pages on the Web in order of
importance.

Dulitz said that Google has no pay inclusion program and doesn't
plan on offering one, which was met with a round of applause from
attendees.

What's important to Google?

* The most important thing to Google is great content.
* Use user-friendly navigation.
* Make sure that the site shows up in all browsers.
* Work hard on building your link popularity. Get links from
well-respected sites, which is the "peer review" aspect of the
Web. Links should be visible and described accurately in an
effort to get people to click on them.

If you want to appear at the top of the results in Google, Dulitz
recommends advertising with AdWords.

Why are sites dropped from Google?

* If a page is unreachable when Google's spider tries to crawl
it, it will get dropped.
* Also, sites can get banned because of "serious" offenses,
either detected manually or automatically.


Dynamic Content

One of the participants asked which of the engines index dynamic
content.

* Google will index dynamic content and will crawl pages with
question marks or cgi references.
* Inktomi will index dynamic content but only a few pages from
each site. You can form a partnership with Inktomi and they will
index more pages.
* Fast doesn't crawl dynamic pages with question marks or large
databases behind them.
* AltaVista can index dynamic content and can handle question
marks. You can submit through their Basic Submit for free or
through Express Inclusion. However, if your content changes
frequently, they don't want to index those pages because by the
time the pages make it into the index, the content has changed.


Automated Queries

How do the engines feel about automated queries?

* Google's Terms of Service
(http://www.google.com/terms_of_service.html) states, "You may
not send automated queries of any sort to Google's system without
express permission in advance from Google. Note that `automated
queries' includes using any software which sends queries to
Google to determine how a website `ranks' on Google for various
queries."
* AltaVista doesn't encourage the use of automated queries for
checking positions and have stopped huge infractions. On a small
scale, however, they haven't taken an active position to stop
them.


Mark your calendars! The next Search Engine Strategies Conference
(http://seminars.internet.com/sew/fall01/)
will be held in Dallas on November 14-15, 2001, and from there, it
will move to Boston on March 4-5, 2002. Hope to see you there!


This article was written by Robin Nobles, a professional
freelance writer and the Director of Training of the Academy of
Web Specialists. Over the past few years, she has trained several
thousand people in her online and onsite courses in search engine
positioning strategies and has written three books that can be
ordered through Amazon. Visit the Academy's Web site to learn
more about their online courses and products:
http://www.academywebspecialists.com/more_info.