metatags CHECK POSITION Lori’s Link List
Once you’ve submitted your site to the major search engines and directories, you just need to be patient — it takes anywhere from one day to two months or longer for your URL(s) to be added to the various indexes, depending on the resource in question.
Some search engines will index your site immediately while others will simply make a note of it and return later. Likewise, some search engines will index your main page first, and add the rest of your web pages later. Either way, once your web pages are indexed they still need to be added to the live database and this can take some time. In other words, they are placed “in queue.”
Below is our best approximation of the time it takes to get listed with each, at the time of writing this article:
– Generally speaking, AltaVista and Infoseek will list your site the quickest — normally within 1-2 days if you submit your URLs directly using their form.
– Excite — and the various other search resources that it provides results for — will normally list the URLs that you submit within approximately 1-2 weeks.
– The time it takes to get listed in the master Inktomi database depends on which search service you use to submit to it. If you submit directly to HotBot it usually takes between 2-4 weeks, but lately MSN seems faster and if you submit via the add URL page on MSN you’ll probably get listed in just a few days.
– Lycos’ database is relatively outdated compared to the rest of the major search engines, and it’s because they sometimes take quite a while to list new sites. Lycos isn’t terribly reliable — our best estimation right now is 2-6 weeks.
– Northern Light doesn’t state how long it takes to get listed in their database after submitting, but our experience says that it’s approximately 2-4 weeks.
Once you’ve submitted your site you’ll want to wait awhile and then check back to see if and where your web pages are listed.
Some search engines make it easy to confirm that your URL(s) are listed in their database (through commands or a URL status page), while others make it more difficult. The links below will help you to find your web pages in the major search engines.
1) http://AltaVista.com , http://Infoseek.com , and http://NorthernLight.com
Search engines AltaVista, Infoseek, and Northern Light make checking for your URLs easy. Simply enter the URL you want to check in their search box, prefaced by “url:” like this:
url:yourdomain.com
url:yourdomain.com/products/
url:yourdomain.com/products/new.html
The first example will list all URLs under a domain that are listed, the second example will list URLs within a particular directory and the last example will list just the specific URL entered. Note that the URLs you enter after url: shouldn’t include the www prefix. You can add this, but if Alta Vista has indexed your site without it your pages won’t turn up. You can also forget about starting with http:// — it’s not necessary.
Excite makes it tough to find your listings. Rumor has it that they are working on a URL status feature, but for now all you can do is search for variations of your URL(s). There is no guarantee that your pages will be listed first, but selecting “list by web site” will help to reduce the clutter by grouping all of your listed pages together. If necessary, search for your URL(s) both with and without the “www” prefix. WebCrawler is basically a miniature version of Excite, and they do have a URL status page that you can try — it’s located at http://webcrawler.com/Help/GetListed/Status.html . If your URL(s) show up here you’ll know that you’re listed in Excite. On the other hand, if your URL(s) don’t show up in Webcrawler that doesn’t mean you aren’t listed in Excite — because Webcrawler doesn’t use Excite’s entire database.
There are several ways to check for your pages in HotBot, starting with the search box itself. If you search for “domain:yourdomain.com” you should see a list of all of your pages in the Inktomi database — in no particular order. To search for pages within one directory only, search for “domain:yourdomain.com originalurlpath:directory”.
A search for “domain:yourdomain.com originalurlpath:products” for example would display all indexed pages in the directory at http://www.yourdomain.com/products/. This is the easiest way to find your listings if you don’t have your own domain name. You would simply search for your host’s domain and your directory. If you click on “more search options” from the main search page and scroll down a bit you’ll see a “location” field. If you enter yourdomain.com in it, and then scroll back up and hit “search” without entering any search terms, that will also display all pages on that domain name which are listed in the database.
Finally, HotBot also has a URL status page that you may want to try at http://hotbot.lycos.com/help/checkurl.asp . It’s basically just another way to perform the searches described above, but it’s not as powerful as using the advanced search form because it doesn’t offer the various search criteria.
Lycos’ URL status page is at http://www.lycos.com/addasite.html but it’s useless because it only tells you if your site has been visited by their indexing spider. To see if your URL(s) have been added to the database you’ll have to search for them manually. Try searching for both “www.yourdomain.com” and “yourdomain.com,” as well as searching for particular phrases that are contained in the title and/or body of the page you’re looking for. If you can’t seem to locate your URLs after waiting a few weeks, try resubmitting them and see what happens. If you’re feeling lucky you could also email the search engine in question and see if they can help — you may or may not get a reply any time soon. While it’s nice to know if your site has been added to a search engine’s live database, it’s even more important to know where it’s actually ranked. Generally speaking the way to do this is to simply perform a search for the keywords or keyword phrases that you’ve targeted in order to see if and where you show up — but the resources below can also help in that process.
These services and software programs can be used to reduce the time you spend on searching for your listings in the major search engines — and a few can even automate much of the process. Take a look. However, keep in mind that unless search engines are a top priority you probably shouldn’t worry about any of the paid services or commercial software. Here are some of them:
http://informant.dartmouth.edu
A free service that will save your favorite search engine queries and web sites, check them periodically, and send you email whenever there are new or updated pages.
The free service will report where your web pages rank in a few of the popular search engines, and the paid service goes as far as attempting to analyze your web pages and suggest corrections or changes that will supposedly get them ranked higher.
Monitor your web site ranking on the top search engines for different keywords and receive weekly email reports. PositionAgent also tests your URL for search engine readiness, browser compatibility, bad links, and more.
A free online tool to help you determine your “ranking” on different keyword sets in 10 of the major search engines. The spider tells you not only if your site is in the top 200 results, but also lists the sites that are in the top 10 on that search.
ScoreCheck searches for your keywords and shows you where your web pages — up to 4 at a time — are ranked by ten of the popular search engines and indexes.
http://www.peacefire.org/tracerlock/
TracerLock can monitor search engines for you and notify you by email when a new instance of a search term is found. It’s actually best used for competitive intelligence.
Probably the most popular of them all, WebPosition generates comprehensive reports on all aspects of your search engine rankings. There’s a free trial version available, but it’s not nearly as powerful as WebPosition Gold. If search engines are a top priority for you, this is the one software program to consider purchasing — it’s pretty darn cool.
http://dmoz.org/add.html
http://www.jayde.com/cgi-bin/addurl.cgi
http://www.altavista.digital.com/av/content/addurl.htm
http://www.canada.com/search/web/addurl.asp
http://www.excite.com/info/add_url/
http://www.alltheweb.com/addurl.html
http://www.google.com/addurl.html
http://infoseek.go.com/AddUrl
http://hotbot.lycos.com/addurl.asp
http://www.looksmart.com/r?l&page=/siteSubmit/categ.html&catno=&category=
http://www.lycos.com/addasite.html
http://directory.netscape.com/add.html – run by DMOZ.org editors so there is no need to submit to both.
http://www.northernlight.com/docs/regurl_help.html
http://www.snap.com/LMOID/resource/0,566,home-1078,00.html?st.sn.ft.0.surl
http://search.msn.com/addurl.asp
http://www.directhit.com/util/addurl.html
http://www.webcrawler.com/info/add_url/
http://www.yahoo.com