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February 15, 2000
Submitting to HotBot and Staying Indexed
A customer of ours, Steve Crim, forwarded the following e-mail to me that he received from Daryl Rosen of Inktomi's Partner Services. Steve was asking why his pages had not been indexed or why they had been dropped from the index. Many of the tips I'd heard before, however, the last one is new to me. It should not be overlooked in your search engine marketing strategy.
If you have trouble getting indexed on HotBot, then possible causes are:
1) Your web server does not respond when HotBot requests the URL. It may be busy or temporarily off-line. Check the web server and try re-submitting to the portal.
2) Your URL is dynamically generated, containing a query string ("?") or other characters. Our crawler may not be able to retrieve certain types of dynamic content. Try creating a static URL and re-submit to the portal.
3) You misspelled your URL or added any incorrect characters, it will show as a "bad link." Verify the syntax and try re-submitting to the portal.
4) Your URL is basically Spam. Inktomi performs a rigorous set of quality checks to detect Spam and will filter this type of content before it is added to our index.
5) The amount of inbound links to your URL has significant importance in staying indexed. URLs that do not contain more than one link to them from other domains may not survive more than one refresh cycle (about every 3 - 4 weeks). Consider having other www sites link to your URL and try re-submitting to the portal.
-Daryl Rosen Inktomi Corporation Partner Services Manager
Next month I'll report on how to increase your link popularity (i.e., the number of sites that link to you) and the tremendous benefits of doing so.
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