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Supported Search Engine Support Chart

 

 

Index Feature Yes No Comments
Full Text of Page Most Most have max of 64k Naughty words put you in the adult category
Flagged (adult) Words Altavista, Lycos, Google Excite, Inktomi, Infoseek, NLight  
Metatag Description Most Google, Lycos, NLight  
Index Metatag Keywords Some Google, Lycos, NLight  
Index ALT text Altavista, Infoseek Excite, Google, Inktomi, Lycos, NLight  
Index Comments Lycos, Inktomi    
Root Word Extrapolation Infoseek, Lycos (stemming finds rock for rocks)
Indexers Yes No Comments
Deep Crawl Excite, Google, Inktomi, NLight Altavista, Infoseek, Lycos, WebCrawler Excite, Aol and WebCrawler basically only list root pages
Instant Indexing Lycos all the rest Pages appear at random from everyone anymore.
Index CGI's Inktomi Only    
Frames Support Altavista, Google, N.Light Lycos, Excite, Inktomi, Infoseek, Lycos
Image Maps Infoseek, NLight Alavista, Excite, Google, Inktomi, Lycos  
Robots Exclusion Standard Most   Google only checks occasionally
Robots Meta Tag Alta,Infoseek, Excite, Inktomi Google, Lycos  
Link citations influence visits Infoseek, Inktomi, Lycos, Google Altavista, Excite, NLight  
URL Check Infoseek, Altavista, Google Excite, NLight Hotbots only works for root domains.
Results Rankings Yes No Comments
Meta Tags help Rankings at Infoseek, Inktomi Altavista, Excite, Google, Lycos, NLight  
Reviewed Site Pumps Ranking Excite, Infoseek (big time!) Altavista, Google, Inktomi, Lycos, NLight Very important with Infoseek and now Lycos is pumping ODP sites.
Citation Counts Help Ranking Altavista, Excite, Lycos, Google, Infoseek, Inktomi NLight Google is into it.
Click Thru Counts Boost Ranking HotBot, Excite, Lycos, MSN, ICQit    
Percieved Spam Action Yes No Comments
Meta Refresh Tag of Death Altavista (huge), Infoseek (huge), Lycos, Excite Google, Inktomi, NLight  
Invisible Text Most nail hard for it Google  
Small Text Only Inktomi    

Notes:

Crawlers:

Currently, only Inktomi, Google, and new search engine FAST (alltheweb.com) support full crawling of sites. None of the others currently crawl. There are just to many pages on the web now for them to randomly crawl sites.

Hotbot, MSN, Lycos, and ICQit, are now using the Direct Hit click through counting service to rank results.

Excite has also started using its own click-thru counter to influence results.

Citation Counts

The biggest citation (links to your site) counter is Google. Almost all the others are now counting citations too.

Domain Name Keywords

The use of keywords in domain names is fairly important to Altavista, Hotbot, Infoseek, and Lycos. Put Excite in your domain name (with a dash), if you want killer rankings on Excite. Almost all of the adult sites listed on Excite now have EXCITE in the domain name. Keywords should be separated words by dash (www.team-mp3.com gets good hits on "MP3").

Small Text

This is an extremely controversial subject. Some promo experts claim small text (size="1") will destroy your rankings on some engines. I have found that this is not true on all of the big search engines. I have numerous pages for clients with small text in them that rank great. I don't know how this myth started. With the new browsers such as Opera or IE5, small text is very readable when properly configured. Invisible (white on white) text is another story entirely (it'll kill ya dead).

Comments and Alt Tags

Only Inktomi reads and indexes comment tags. Only Altavista and InfoSeek index ALT tag text.

Root Word Extrapolation

Infoseek, Lycos and NorthernLight will look for variations of a word based on its root word. Searching for boat will also search for boats or boating.

Case Sensitivity

Only Altavista cares about case.

Keyword Spread

Keywords spread throughout the page is important to Altavista, Inktomi and somewhat to Webcrawler. Surprisingly, keywords on these engines are just as important near the bottom of the page as the top. Recently (june 99) I had several high ranking sets of pages that had keywords ONLY near the bottom of the page on Altavista. (not the case currently).

 

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