The Truth About Search Engines - Part 2
Robot Travel
If there is one thing I have learned about robots, it is that there is absolutely no pattern to them. Most
robots are stupid and wander randomly. For example, 50% of robot hits to my sites, ask for the robots.txt
page and then go away never asking for anything else. Then they come back a week later, ask for the same
thing and then go away, again.
This happens over and over again for months. I have never figured it out. What are they doing?
If they wanted to see if the website was really a web site, they could just Ping it. This would be much
faster and much more efficient. They seldom visit another page and if they do, they ask for one other page
every visit or so.
Some come in and issue rapid-fire requests for every page in the website. How rude! You have
to quit worrying so much about robots. It takes 6 months before they request enough pages to do you any good.
I really quit thinking about them a long time ago. Build a lot of pages correctly and, if you have reciprocal
links to them, the robots will find them someday.
Try this: Go to AltaVista and type into the search box link:YourSite.com (Leave off the www).
This will list the reciprocal links to your web site.
Try link:crownjewels.com and you get 136 links to it. Think about this now: The robots say to
themselves, "Here is a site that must be popular or why would so many websites SIMILAR to it have it's link
on their pages?" Remember that only SIMILAR sites with SIMILAR THEMES would probably have a link to your
site. They give more importance to this than you submitting your link to them. Wouldn't you?
Go to heavily trafficked sites matching your web site's Themes and use AltaVista to find out how many
reciprocal links they have. This will prove to you I am right.
Search engines are nothing more than links to your site. The problem is, you are constantly having to fight
for your positioning in the search query listings. Forget about that. Leave the fighting to people who are
able to spend 24 hours a day trying to trick everybody. Quit trying to compete with the large organizations
pouring millions into their marketing. Completely forget about Search Engine positioning and go after the
reciprocal links. The Search Engines will then believe you are a heavily visited site because you will be.
You will now be getting the traffic you so richly deserve.
Search engine visitors to your site, are often-times not qualified visitors. Too many visitors pop into your
home page for 2 seconds and then leave. You know how it is. We all do it when we are using the search
engines. Either it wasn't the information we were looking for, or they had this huge graphic on this stupid
portal page, which just took forever to load. These visitors shouldn't even count, but they get counted as
12-18 hits in your server logs. Hits are requests to the server. One page request can incur a lot of hits:
requests to the page itself plus the graphics, each count as a hit.
Reciprocal links bring in qualified visitors. These are visitors who were already on a web site which had
matching Themes to yours. They already have a good idea of what type of site you are. They will come into
your site and actually stay awhile. These visitors should count as double credit, they are so good.
I know which type of visitor I would rather have.
How do you get people to WANT to put your link on their web sites? Why would a similar site put a link to
your site on theirs? Simple, you have similar Themes. You are similar, but not competition.
There is one very important lesson to be learned from this crazy robot behavior. You need to make the
navigation in your web site so easy that a visitor can find any page within 2 clicks of your home page. One
way of doing this is installing hidden DotLinks.
Dotlinks are little periods that are linked to other pages which are not really noticeable on
your page if you put it as a period. Although they are not easily seen by the human eye, they are a link that
a robot can follow] in your web site. When you do this, robots can find your pages faster and more easily.
Giving the Robots What They Want
So how do you make the search engine robots give your site a better rating than all the other millions of
websites trying to do the same thing? Simple, give them what they want. You can't trick them or make them
think that you are better than you are. Think about a visit from the eyes of a robot. He finds a site,
usually from links embedded in web pages, then loads the text from the first page.
He looks for the META tags and pulls out the keywords and description. If not there he takes the first 200 or
so characters of text and uses them as a description.
The Title is extracted.
He extracts the pure text from the page (strips out the HTML coding). He takes out the common words leaving
what he feels may be keywords. (Most do not do this last step.)
He now extracts the hyperlinks collating them into those that belong to this website and those that don't (He
visits these later as this is how he finds new websites).
He may do the same with the email addresses.
He goes on to the next page and so on until he has visited all of the pages in your web site.
Now he stores all of this information.
He now knows how many pages you have, how many 'outside hyperlinks in your site', and can give your site a
score based on how it is set up. These are the basics.
What do they do with the info? When someone comes to search a phrase or keyword, another search routine
program takes over using the information the robot found. A person types in the keywords and the search
program returns the 256,000 pages matching their keywords. BUT they also consider the following: How old is
the website or how long has the engine known about it? How large is the website? Was it properly constructed?
How many hyperlinks are there to outside websites?
VERY IMPORTANT! How many hyperlinks are located on other websites to this site. The older and better the
website the more links to it.
These robots know when you are cheating. You can't trick them. It is so simple for the robot developer to
incorporate code to negate the tricks. What about scoring keywords only once or twice per page or area like
meta, title, etc? Is this page close in size to all the other portal pages? How many web pages in the same
directory have the word "index" in them? Does this site have a lot of content? Is any text the same color as
the background? Are there links to outside sites? Each page can be checked and compared against what the
robot feels is a statistically normal page. These are computers you know.
You need a lot of pages with normal content. Instead of spending the time to make fake pages, give the real
ones content. This will also give your visitors something to come back to. CONTENT.
Content has been reprinted with permission of the author.
First appeared in
http://www.cyber-robotics.com
© 1999-2000 David Notestine, all rights remain with author.
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