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Search Engines - The Different Types Of Search Engines & How They Work |
| Having trouble getting listed in a search engines? Your
website not ranking as well as you would like? This page explains the
how search engines work, how they gather the data that appears in their
search results and the different types of search engines. |
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Crawler Based Search Engines |
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Major search engines these days are crawler based (Such as
Google and
AltaVista) which
means that they will crawl or spider the pages of your website and index
them in their databases accordingly. So when a user types in a search
term the search engine will return the most relevant results based on
the information they have stored in their databases. |
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If you change your any part of your web pages, crawler based search
engines will eventually find these changes and this can affect your
rankings. Your page titles, body content and other elements such as
links and alt tags (image description tags) also play a role. |
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Human Edited Search Engines & Directories |
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Human edited directories (Such as the
Open Directory) as the
name suggests depends on people for its listings. When you submit a
website to a human edited directory you are required to submit a
description and also chose the category that you think is the closest
match to your website content. An editor then reviews your submission,
modifies it if required and then adds it if he or she thinks the content
is good enough for inclusion. Very few submissions are actually added
due to the large amount of submissions that these directories receive.
They normally only add websites that are unique and have very good
content. |
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Making changes your web pages has no effect on human edited directories.
The only exception is that a good website, with good content is more
likely get reviewed and added than for a poor website. |
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Hybrid & Mixed Results Search Engines |
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Some search engines also display mixed results (Such as
MSN,
AOL and
Netscape) from
both crawled sites and human added sites. These search engines may not
always produce results that are as relevant as crawler based search
engines due to the fact that they also add paid submissions. An example
of this is MSN who use human added "paid" listings from
Looksmart. |
