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Excite has no posted policy in regard to spamming or spoofing of their spider or regarding the number of submissions you can make, but just because don't post their policy, it does not mean they don't have one. Nor does it mean they don't take action when it is violated. They do!.
Excite indexes all visible page text, ignoring alt text, comments and the keywords meta tag. They don't support frames.
Last year, Excite shifted their policy towards meta tags radically. Originally, they ignored keywords and description meta tags. Instead, they used an artificial intelligence routine to
determine what each page was about and used that text in its summary. This, of course this led to many complaints from unhappy webmasters who used metaphors and so forth on their sites.
So Excite changed their collective mind and offered support for meta description tags. If your page includes that tag, it will use that to summarize your website. If you include no
description tag, Excite's artificial intelligence will determine one for you, which is not always good or accurate.
Here is what Excite has to say about their ranking methods:
Our design tip is simple: Relegate unrelated topics to subsidiary pages. If you're advertising your Hawaiian Bed and Breakfast, don't use the homepage to emphasize price, the way
the ocean looks from a bedroom window, or your famous pineapple rum concoction. Instead, keep it simple: Emphasize bed, breakfast, Hawaii, and vacation.
In other words, they want your pages to be focused on a single topic. That is not always an easy thing to do, but it is essential if you want a good listing in this search engine. It is
usually best to keep your pages very small and limited, making a new page for each topic of your site.
Because Excite seems to have a limit on how many pages they will list from any one domain. It appears that limit is between 2 and 3 pages. The most effective technique for us has been
to choose 10 or 15 pages on the domain to submit. On each of those pages, insert a NOFOLLOW tag so that the spider will only see the ones you are submitting. They will most likely discard some of your submissions,
but you should end up with a few of the ones you've chosen.
They have announced that they are expanding their index size to 250 million listings, so any time now, we should see more listings. I wouldn't hold my breath, though.
- What Will Excite Index? Titles and keyword frequency in text.
- How Long Will It Take? 6 to 8 weeks
- How Many Pages Do I Submit? All main pages.
- What Meta Tags Does Excite Support? Title and description.
- How Long Can I Make My Tags? Title: 70 characters, Description: 395 characters, Keyword: N/A
- Does It Support Alt Tags? No
- Are Searches on Excite Case Sensitive? No.
- Is There Anything Else I Should Know? Excite has a new 3-D search engine called, Excite Extreme, to be targeted at people with Pentium III processors and Windows 98. Excite uses listings
from LookSmart to feed their channels in the "directory" part of their site.
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