Topic Category: Other Search Engines
September 26, 2007
Dmoz Not Dead, Opens Official Open Directory Project Blog.
By Scott Goodyear
From time to time you'll hear that Dmoz, aka The Open Directory Project, is dead. This is because it is near impossible to get into the directory. After submitting a site to Dmoz, it can take days or even years if you are actually accepted for inclusion into this volunteer driven directory. Even if it takes years, there just isn't clear communication between Dmoz volunteers and the status of your application.
September 06, 2007
"Are Paid Links Evil?" from SES San Jose, what you missed...
By Scott Goodyear
I'm back from attending the Search Engine Strategies (SES) conference in San Jose and I'm putting together a few posts about my experience. In the meantime, I'll relate part of my experience from the "Are Paid Links Evil?" session. It was a lively session that was more food for thought than actionable tips...
December 20, 2006
International SEO, A Check List for Improving the Rankings of International Web Sites.
By Scott Goodyear
www.webposition.com
Need to improve a site's rankings in an international search engine? Have you already tried traditional optimization of content and link strategies? What else can an SEO do? Surprisingly, there are a few more steps to be considered in order to improve an international web site which can also prove helpful when pursuing improved international search engine rankings.
August 14, 2006
An Introduction to the Social Scene: Social Bookmarking and Tagging
by Scott Goodyear
Have you been wondering what all the recent talk about social search, social bookmarks, and social SEO has been about? In this article we'll go over a few of the services that you may or may not be familiar with, what they do, and how you may be able to take part in these services.
May 24, 2006
Alltheweb Beta Tests Livesearch - Adds Features Without Complexity
By Scott Goodyear
Alltheweb is now beta testing a new search service called "LiveSearch". In case you have not heard of Alltheweb, it is best known as an engine that is similar in it's general simplicity / appearance to their competitor Google. Compared to Alltheweb's normal search service, Livesearch adds an auto complete feature that provides related searches and phrases as you type. This auto complete feature is similar to Google's own beta search service called "Google Suggest" but Livesearch has a few improvements worth noting.
June 15, 2004
The Coming Local File Search Wars
Now that Google and other engines have indexed billions of pages on the Web, what's the next big frontier in search? It is to bring that technology home by extending search to your local desktop
April 15, 2004
What's happening with AltaVista, AlltheWeb, Yahoo and others right now?
A number of the major engines are going through a turbulent transition period right now. If you've traveled to AltaVista, AllTheWeb, or Yahoo recently, you may be a bit confused. Merging of the three engines is well underway. Therefore, the search results of each engine are much more similar than they were in the past, but they are not always identical.
January 15, 2004
Big changes continue at LookSmart
As many of you already know, LookSmart will be losing its biggest partner, MSN on January 15th, 2004. This came after Microsoft announced it would not be renewing its contract with LookSmart.
October 15, 2003
AllTheWeb and AltaVista Merging: What It Means To You
Back in February 2003, Overture announced its intentions to acquire both AltaVista and FAST, the Norwegian search company operating AllTheWeb.com. We're now seeing the merging of the two engines' technologies.
October 15, 2003
LookSmart Class Action Settlement: You May Be Entitled to Hundreds of Free Clicks or Even a Cash Refund
As some of you may recall, LookSmart infuriated countless customers last year when it announced that it was converting everyone's lifetime listing in the LookSmart catalog to a pay-per-click program. Obviously, people that paid a "one-time" fee of $199 or more for a LookSmart listing were none too thrilled at the idea of having to pay ongoing fees every month. LookSmart informed all of its customers that if they wished to remain listed in the catalog, they would now have to pony up a fee for each click-through they received.
April 15, 2002
Millions Unknowingly Blacklisted by FAST's AllTheWeb.com
Planet Ocean's April report featured an interesting interview of Stephen Baker, FAST's Director of Business Development and Marketing. Although I don't have permission to reprint the entire interview here, I can offer perhaps the most interesting and significant quote from the interview. Mr. Baker was quoted as saying:
January 15, 2002
Excite Becomes Clone of Overture
In last month's newsletter, I mentioned that Excite.com after declaring bankruptcy was purchased by InfoSpace. InfoSpace has now converted Excite's search engine so that it simply searches the Overture database. This has been a trend for search engines that find themselves in financial trouble.
December 15, 2001
Excite@Home Bankrupt -- InfoSpace Snatches Up Excite.com
As some of you may know, Excite@Home has been going through bankruptcy and liquidation proceedings. In late November, it looked uncertain whether Excite.com would continue to function. AT&T made an offer to buy some of Excite@Home's broadband assets but not the portal.
December 15, 2001
AllTheWeb Becomes The World's "Freshest" Search Engine
This past month, FAST announced a new version of www.AlltheWeb.com that combines real-time indexing of news stories from over three thousand online sources. This has created the freshest Web results of any major search engine, at least in regard to the news. In fact, the updated AlltheWeb can index up to 800 news stories per minute. FAST claims to index current event stories within minutes, rather than many hours or days like other major search engines.
August 15, 2001
Exclusive Interview with AltaVista
As most of you know, Fredrick Marckini is the founder and CEO of iProspect.com, a leading search engine positioning firm and a frequent contributor to the MarketPosition Newsletter. iProspect counts many Fortune 500 companies among their clients and they have great experience in this market area. Mr. Marckini has been generous enough to provide us with articles based on several recent exclusive interviews he was granted with senior executives and engineers at major search engines and directories.
July 15, 2001
Excite Reveals Rankings Tips, Changes, and Its Future Direction
An Excite.com interview published in this month's Search Engine Watch newsletter (http://www.searchenginewatch.com) revealed several interesting tips regarding recent changes at the search service:
May 15, 2001
Exclusive Interview with Open Directory Representative
As many of you may know, Fredrick Marckini is the founder and CEO of iProspect.com, one of the country's leading search engine positioning companies and a periodic contributor to the MarketPosition Newsletter. He was generous enough to provide us with a copy of an exclusive interview he did with a representative at Open Directory. Isn't it good to be a MarketPosition subscriber?
March 15, 2001
Tips for Achieving Top Rankings on About.com
After doing careful research, we found that About.com has many advantages to offer Web marketers. The most notable is that About.com has grown substantially to become the 6th most popular Web property on the Internet as ranked by Media Metrix in February. That means a good listing there can provide a great deal more traffic for your Web site than many other search engines.
March 15, 2001
Go.com Re-organized / Infoseek Bites the Bullet
Well, it's official. The Infoseek search engine owned by Disney and hosted at Go.com is no more. After continued financial losses and according to many analysts, some mismanagement by Disney, Go.com has decided to reorganize and down-size. The new purpose of Go.com is to provide a doorway to other Disney properties such as ESPN, ABC, and others, along with their affiliates under one umbrella. They wish to leverage the assets they have while spending as little money as possible on new technology for Go.com.
February 15, 2001
Goto.com Removes Keyword Service from Public View
Goto.com for years has offered a free service to the public to help locate popular keywords. However, Goto.com has recently pulled this service from public view and made it available only to those who setup an account with them of $50 or more.
February 15, 2001
Disney Shuts Down Go.com
Go.com has become the latest victim of the dot com shake out. In a surprise move on January 29th, Disney announced that Go.com will close by the end of February. Traffic will most likely be redirected to other Disney properties.
January 15, 2001
Nine Tips for Improving Your Excite.com Rankings
I recently received a copy of an e-mail from an Excite.com representative listing out nine tips for improving your rankings on their engine. Here are the tips sent by the Excite representative:
April 15, 2000
What does AltaVista consider spam?
So what is spam? That's the $64,000 question. The definition varies for each search engine (and even by who you talk to at the search engine), and it can change from week to week. In the case of AltaVista, I've read postings by several AltaVista representatives. I even had a member of our staff, Chad Stearns, call a contact at AltaVista that we ran across: Ty Tresseter. Here's Chad's recap of the conversation he had with Mr. Tresseter:
April 15, 2000
Our AltaVista Recommendations
Here is a summary of our recommendations for optimizing webpages for the AltaVista search engine.
March 15, 2000
A Wealth of AltaVista Information
AltaVista recently posted a large amount of information about how their search engine works. Novices will find the detailed explanations on certain topics to be very insightful. I also found nuggets of information that even expert Web marketers will find valuable.
February 15, 2000
Open Directory Submission Tip
A customer sent me the following e-mail he received from HotBot last month:
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.
December 15, 1999
Infoseek/Go Network: Significant Submission Change
Go Network (Go.com) recently announced that they are changing the way they index Web sites. In the past, they encouraged you to submit all the specific pages you wanted them to index (up to 50 per day). They are now saying that you should now only submit your primary Web site domain.
December 15, 1999
Scoring Better on DirectHit
DirectHit technology is used on several well-known search engines. You may see a small Powered by Direct Hit logo on engines that currently use this algorithm. Unlike most other search engine spiders, DirectHit scores a page based largely on how often visitors select a site, and how long they appear to stay on the site. The logic being that the site must be more relevant to a search if more people click on it and stay there longer than at other sites.
November 15, 1999
AOL Search Explained
Some of our customers, as well as MarketPosition.com forum users, are confused about the new AOL Search. They are trying to determine whether AOL Search derives results from Open Directory, Inktomi, or some other source. Because of their questions, I did some research and conducted some tests to figure out exactly what was happening on AOL.
April 15, 1999
New Secrets to AltaVista Top Rankings
AltaVista once favored short, concise pages. Those times are long since behind us. Today, our research has shown that longer pages of around 870 to 970 words generally achieve the best rankings on AltaVista. That may sound like a lot of text, but don't skimp here. Creating the page within these parameters will often make a huge difference in your rankings.
February 15, 1999
Solution to Disappearing Pages on Excite
I’ve reported in the past how Excite likes to cycle through every couple weeks and drop pages at random. A customer pointed out that the problem appears to be Excite’s limit of no more than 25 pages per Web site.
December 15, 1998
HotBot Domain Tip
Obtaining a domain name with your keyword in it can significantly improve your score in HotBot.
November 15, 1998
Letter and tips from Infoseek
Here’s part of a letter sent by an InfoSeek representative in reply to one of our customers. The following excerpts contain new tips for InfoSeek:
August 15, 1998
Tips for Ranking Higher in HotBot
In general, HotBot has always been harder to rank well than most engines. However, there's some tips that will definitely improve your odds.
March 15, 1998
So, who's the biggest after all? - March 1998
According to Relevant Knowledge, a company that measures audience projections (unique visitors) for Web advertisers and publishers, search engines again remain among the top traffic drawing sites on the Web. Here's the breakdown of unique visitors (only search engines listed):
January 15, 1998
AltaVista Cracks down on Abuse
Business Week reported that AltaVista had begun a new initiative to crack down on Web sites who abuse their system according to a November 17th, 1997 article.
December 15, 1997
InfoSeek Keyword Limit Clarified
In one of our previous articles I reported on the three keyword limit with InfoSeek meta tags. I received some controversy about whether the limit actually existed and how it was applied. So, I decided to create a number of pages which contained varying numbers of a made up keyword called "metasnafutest" in the meta tag.
September 15, 1997
Hotbot Goes to 48 Hour Indexing
In the search engine news, Hotbot recently announced that it will index your pages within 48 hours. Before, it took weeks! This makes trying different page designs, resubmitting, and then following up much easier. HotBot has followed suite with AltaVista which takes 1-3 days, and InfoSeek which will index your page in minutes!
