Step 6 - Promotion (Continued)

Search Engine Characteristics

No two search engines index your Web page exactly the same way, which is one reason why the same search on different search engines produces different results.

The table below explains the characteristics of search engines - their use of meta data, spider support, ranking factors and search engine index lag time. For an explaination of each characteristic, click on the numbers 1/ through 5/

Search Engine 1/

META Tags Support 2/

Spider Support 3/

Popularity Increases Rankings 4/

Lag Time 5/

Alexa

Yes

Alexa bot

Yes

8 weeks

Altavista

No

Yahoo! Slurp

Yes

4-8 weeks

AOL

No

ODP

Yes

2 weeks or more

Exactseek

Yes

Exactseekbot

Yes

24 hours or less

Google

Yes*

Googlebot

Yes

1-2 weeks

Jayde

No

Jaydebot

No

3-4 weeks

MSN

Yes

MSNBot

No

3-4 weeks

Open Directory Project (ODP)

No

Yes

No

2 weeks or more

Splat Search

Yes

Splatrobot

No

2-3 weeks

Yahoo!

No

Yahoo! Slurp

No

8 weeks or more

1/Search engines. Most search engines work by sending out a spider to fetch submitted documents. Another program, called an indexer, then reads these documents and creates an index based on the words contained in each document. Each search engine uses a proprietary algorithm to create its indices such that, ideally, only meaningful results are returned for each query. Return to top.

2/META Tags. Are special HTML tags that provides information about a Web page. Unlike normal HTML tags, meta tags do not affect how the page is displayed. Instead, they provide information such as what the page is about, which keywords represent the page's content and who created the page. Many search engines use meta tags when they build and update their indices. Return to top

3/Spider Support. As mentioned above spiders are programs used by some search engines to fetch submitted documents. Return to top

4/Popularity. Some search engines count the number of linked to a page to measure its popularity. Those with largest number of linked sites receives a higher rating. Return to top

5/Lag Time. The time required to index a page and have it appear in subsequent search results. All search engine submission times are approximations. Return to top

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