Tag: engines

How Search Engines Teach Users To Search

I recently had a conversation about search with my sister, who’s a college librarian. It was interesting to (for once) think about search outside of its marketing potential. She told me about about students who type in natural language search queries (sometimes simply typing in the name of their class or assignment title) and dreamed of a search engine that will understand exactly what searchers are looking for.

What You Can Expect From Search Engines

Search engines will be a way for you to generate from as little as 20% to as much as 60% of your business online (depending on what other marketing techniques you use). Since there are over 130,000,000 webpages in existence (yes that is 130 million!), it is extremely important to understand how they work and how to increase your chances of being placed in the top 20 of the search results. For example, if you were to type “music” and “CD” into the AltaVista search engine as a keyword the result would be over 1,000,000 related site URLs.

Flash based web sites and the search engines

As with many of my articles and newsletters, this one is inspired by a question put to me: “Is it true that you should not have a flash web site since search engines do not recognize flash? ”

The short answer to the question is yes and no. 🙂

Search engines traditionally cannot see flash – but since Flash 4, Macromedia (the guys who make Flash) built into Flash the capability to be ‘seen’ by the engines. Today search engines like AlltheWeb.com, Lycos and Google among others can index (see into) Flash movies, but only in a limited way. As far as I can tell, the engines can only extract links from the Flash movies and not much else. Compare this to an HTML page where the search engine robots (the automated programs that search engines use to surf and catalogue the web) can read everything about the page and thus your web site will have a much better chance of appearing in the search engines.

Disabling Google and Other Search Engines From Crawling a Site

Reader question: I have a online database of horror movies, and I have a good Google rank. In my traffic logs I noted the last month a really growing of the bandwidth: one of the most important browsers of the server logs is Googlebot, so this traffic was generated for the spidering engine of Google. I have the 20 Gb bandwidth limit and I don’t want to pay for excess, so I disable Google into my Web site. My question is:

Back To Top