Gibson Grafx - Marketing Services
Search Engine Basics
Search engines are used by almost every Internet user to find information. There are three basic types of "Search Engines."
The Indexing Engine: True indexing engines such as Google or Alta Vista and the like actually go out and index your web page or entire site. Alta Vista for example, indexes every word on every page of your site.
Non-Indexing Engine: Non-indexing engines depend on the information you provide to them to list your site.
Directories: Online directories depend on information provided by you for site title, description, and keywords. Most online directories have their listing broken down into specific categories and require that you also choose what category(s) you wish to have your site listed under. Yahoo! is the best known example of this type of directory.
Regardless of the type of search engine or directory, they all maintain their own database of site information which contain indexed descriptions of web pages.
The average time between submitting your URL and getting it into the databases varies greatly between the search engines. Several of the larger, true indexing engines will post your new submission within 24-48 hours. Directories can takeup to 5-8 weeks.
Search engines rank each document they find in relation to a given search query. Relevant scores reflect the number of times a search term appears, if it appears in the title, if it appears at the beginning of the document or HTML tags, and if all the search terms are near each other.
Each search engine uses a different method of ranking. For example, if there are no links to other files or pages within a file (in other words, a single page website), some search engines will not register the page. Some use META information, some do not.
Many of the major search engines are in a state of constant change. What was acceptable last week may not be today. A page that ranked high yesterday may be completely removed from an engine tomorrow. What gave a certain page a very high ranking before may not work now.
Free For All Link Pages (FFA)
These are pages containing nothing but a long list of links to other sites. They accept submissions from anybody. At one time, such sites were a valid method of generating traffic to your own site. However, with scripts to run FFA sites readily available, most such sites are now nothing more than a way for the site operators to add to their SPAM list. Many such sites don't even have links to their own FFA pages. While it is customary for FFA sites, and some Directories to send out some type of message in response to a submission, some people have created sites for the sole purpose of harvesting E-mail addresses for SPAM. Because of this we don't recommend submission to Free For All link pages.
When we submit your site it is possible that you may become a recipient of unwanted e-mail (SPAM). However if we arrange your hosting we can set up a separate e-mail address to be used for your site submissions. This way you have the choice of reading it or not and it will not clog up your main e-mail address.
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