by Managing Director
Lyndsay Menzies
In the same way that there are two camps in the
directory based properties,
spider based
search engines (as described earlier) also split into those that charge and those that don't. Those search engines that charge for inclusion do offer certain benefits over those that do not. The
robot is guaranteed to visit your site within a certain time period, and often to revisit on a regular basis. However, this does not mean that your site is guaranteed to be included, especially if you are found to be using unethical optimisation techniques, such as
cloaking. The free spider based
search properties often take a lot longer to get round to sending a robot to your site, and may not revisit on a regular basis.
Google is one exception to the rule above in that it has a very regular pattern of indexing as much of the web as it can find, regardless of whether you have submitted your site or not. Often, you will find your site listed in
Google before you even consider using
search engine optimisation, although quite what rank you will achieve without optimisation is another matter. In fact, the only way to be sure that you site is not listed in
Google, long term (if you have any reason to want to not be), is to employ a
Robots Exclusion Protocol, as discussed earlier.
Portals
This article was first published on 06 June 2002 and does not necessarily match current events or the current opinions and views of bigmouthmedia ltd.
