Search Engine Spiders

The Truth About Robots - 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 Web sites 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 Web sites).

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 Web site or how long has the engine known about it? How large is the Web site? Was it properly constructed? How many hyperlinks are there to outside Web sites?

VERY IMPORTANT! How many hyperlinks are located on other Web sites to this site. The older and better the Web site 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.