By David Gikandi, Founder, SearchPositioning.com
[July 24th, 1999]

See Also   Email Marketing Primer   How to Increase Your Online Sales   Take Advantage of Google's AdWords   Using Foreign Search Engines to Boost Your Sales   Getting Sure Profits Through Google, Goto.com and DirectHit   Ten Places You Must Submit Your Site   Clever Profit Growth Software   The Power Of Personalized Email   How To Go Long With Your Web Marketing   How NOT to Promote Your E-business   Winning the Search Engine Wars   Latest Tips on Search Engine Marketing   Are You Wasting Your Money Online?   Should I Hire Another Salesperson or Invest in an Affiliate Program?   The Death of Positioning?   Links: Why You Need Them and How to Get Them   Your #1 Overlooked Business Asset

[This is the second part of a three part article. The first part can be read here].

About Spamdexing

Because the search engines are so overwhelmed, they are coming up with more ways to make their job easier and weed out pages they feel are not worth indexing. One of the new developments is that most engines now insist or highly recommend that you only submit your home page to them and let the engine crawl through your site and index the pages it finds.

If you decide to go against this recommendation and submit a whole bunch of pages through the online submission forms, you will risk being tagged as a "spamdexer" (index spammer).

There is also an indication that engines like AltaVista give a higher ranking to crawled pages than submitted pages. So for your own interests, you want your pages crawled so that they have a higher score. Other engines like Excite will take the same amount of time to add your pages to their index whether you submit them manually or let it crawl to them from your home page. So not only will you be wasting your time submitting each and every page you have to Excite, but you will risk spamming that engine.

Conclusion: submit only your home page and one other major page and let the engines crawl your site. The only exception is Infoseek. Infoseek does not crawl so you must submit every page on your site to it manually. You can make a list of URLs to your pages and email that to Infoseek if you have more than 50 pages you wish to submit (see their submission page for more details).

There are a few other things to watch out for to avoid having your pages excluded from the engines. The following are things that make an engine tag a particular page as spam and therefore not index it. Make sure that none of your pages has any of these.

1. Keyword stuffing. This is the repeated use of a word to increase its frequency on a page. Search engines have the ability to analyze a page and determine whether the frequency is above a "normal" level in proportion to the rest of the words in the document.

2. Invisible text. Some Webmasters stuff keywords at the bottom of a page and make their text color the same as that of the page background. This is also detectable by the engines.

3. Tiny text. Same as invisible text but with tiny, illegible text.

4. Page redirects. Some engines, especially Infoseek, do not like pages that take the user to another page without his or her intervention, e.g. using META refresh tags, cgi scripts, Java, JavaScript, or server side techniques. If you use redirection, it should have a delay of about 7 seconds.

5. META tags stuffing. Do not repeat your keywords in the META tags more than 1 to 3 times, and do not use keywords that are unrelated to the content of your site.

6. Do not submit the same page more than once on the same day to the same search engine.

7. Do not submit virtually identical pages, i.e. do not simply duplicate a Web page, give the copies different file names, and submit them all. That will be interpreted as an attempt to flood the engine.

More: Search engine statistics...