All About the
Real Estate Industry on the Internet
Current Search Engine News Millions in Transactions from the Internet 5/15/00
The Latest on the Search Engines 5/15/00 Less Than 5% of Real Estate Websites Successful 4/11/00
The Latest on the
Search Engines
6/17/2000
A New Study 6/17/2000 from Brent Winters (At First Place Software) http://www.webposition.com
An interesting study conducted by Berrier Associates shows that of people who spend five or more hours a week online, they average an astounding 71% of their time searching for information. Other studies show that one of the most common methods of finding a Web site is through the search engines. Still, the most important statistic I've seen over the years continues to be that the majority of people (around 60-65%) will select their information out of the top 10 matches on any given search. Another 20-25% will click on a site ranking between positions 11 through 20. The bulk of the remaining traffic flows to sites in positions 21 through 30 with sites after position 30 sharing the last 3-4% of the remaining traffic. Although I wasn't able to pull up the exact link to this study, anyone whose done any amount of searching on the Web understands how critical it is for a Web site to rank near the top if they expect people to find them.Getting Indexed by Inktomi, from Brent Winters
Have you become frustrated waiting to be indexed by HotBot lately? I have the solution! Last month a customer, Kirby Inwood of www.kirwood.com e-mailed me with a tip on how to get into the Inktomi (i.e., HotBot) index generally within a few days. Instead of submitting to HotBot.com, which had not indexed him for weeks, he submitted to another Inktomi powered engine, http//www.canada.com and became listed in three days. Since then I've received several other reports confirming the same thing. Submitting to Canada.com is much faster, and not only gets you listed on Canada.com and HotBot, but in all the other Inktomi powered sites like the "Web Page" results for Yahoo.com. To take advantage of this tip, we've posted a free update to WebPosition Gold recently that submits to Canada.com for the HotBot selection. We've heard that HotBot appears to be undergoing some kind of maintenance that has stopped or delayed new sites from being indexed. We'll continue to direct WebPosition submissions to Canada.com until we hear that HotBot has begun indexing sites more quickly.
If you already have WebPosition Gold, simply select Download Latest Update under the WebPosition Help menu to ensure you're current. If you don't have WebPosition Gold and wish to download the free trial, see http//www.webposition.com/download.htm
Based on our tests and customer feedback, many of the sites that were getting the error before are still not being indexed. The only difference is no error is displayed when the blocked site is submitted. I'm told that if you're going to get indexed by AltaVista, you'll see AltaVista's spider, "Scooter," crawl your Web site within a few days of your submission although it may take longer to actually see it in their index. You can learn whether AltaVista paid a visit by either searching your Web site log files manually for the term "Scooter," or by using a log analysis program that reports whether any automated agents have spidered your site recently. I've also heard rumors that AltaVista may have relaxed their anti-spamming rules a little, lifting the ban on some sites. Whether this is true or not, I'd still stay on guard and continue to avoid the scenarios I outlined in previous articles that may red-flag you.
News 5/17/2000
After all the shuffling and changes last fall the search engines have now entered into a new phase. This is a push towards greater relavancy. A large part of this effort is a new set of rules and greater enforcement of the anti-spamming programs. AltaVista leads the pack with the inclusion of multiple tests for spam. This includes monitoring the number of pages submitted as well as looking for volumes of promotional pages. One source claims they are identifying owners of domains that are spamming and are blocking all their domains. In similar ways the other search engines are re-defining the way they rank pages and are eliminating spammers.
As each of the engines have added a directory we are seeing some confusion in the way catagories have been created and we feel many users are avoiding the use of the directories. All these changes are causing a shift in the traffic between the engines. AltaVista has supposedly experienced a negative impact on their stock price as critiques comment on the problems that their anti-spamming program is causing.
It is becoming evermore important to have your website pages properly formatted for the search engines and there are very few website owners that can do this themselves as it is impossible for them to stay current with the changes on the engines.
The top search engines/directories for visitor traffic continue to be AltaVista, AOL and Yahoo. With AOL using the Open Directory it is imperitive to be indexed in that directory. Yahoo uses the Inktomi database for web searches and to be indexed here you must submit through HotBot. MSN is also very strong and should be included as a must have.
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