• Excite has enhanced their engine to make word proximity more important to rankings than in the past. Therefore, to rank well on Excite, you'll need to make a greater effort to keep related keywords in close proximity to each other. Anticipate how surfers will group keywords together in a search and try to group them in the same way on your Web pages.

• Excite claims they are now cracking down on spam and duplicate pages. Therefore, make sure none of your pages are duplicates or near duplicates to each other even if you've placed them on multiple domains.

• Keywords in the title and summary are now more important to your rankings. I assume when they said "summary" they meant the meta description tag.
  

If you've also followed the news, rumors about Excite's continued existence have circulated since their parent company, @Home Corporation announced plans to shift their business focus toward their broadband services. Despite this, a representative of @Home was quoted as saying:

"It's a confusing time, but there's definitely a strong commitment to support the search product," said Pogue. "There will be more clarity at the earnings call in July. [Search] is one of our company's main assets, and we are investing in it and moving forward."

This stated commitment to Excite appears to be re-affirmed by a slew of recent enhancements to the service. It stands to reason that if they secretly planned to kill the popular search engine, that they'd have put new enhancements on hold. However, Pogue does imply that they could change that position if earnings reported in July are poor. I guess we'll have to wait and see.

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