Search Engine Strategies London 2008: Day 3: Meet the Crawlers
Filed Under (Uncategorized) by Melt du Plooy on February 21, 2008
Tagged Under : ask, crawlers, google, msn, search bots
Representatives from major crawler-based search engines discussed their services and took questions from all the attendees present.
Introduced by Mike Grehan, the speakers included Tom Alby from Ask.com, Luisella Mazza from Google and Paul Stoddart from Microsoft.
Luisella started off with the title of her presentation: Learn, diagnose and influence your site in Google
Google’s goals are:
- Better search results – to deliver relevant sites which in turn deliver better information which in turn again provide better web sites
- To provide support for webmasters – providing the same tools for all site sizes
She went through Google Webmaster Tools and gave a few tips which is very helpful.
Tip 1: Make title tags, alt atributes and descriptions descriptive and accurate
Tip 2: Make sure search bots can crawl your site without session ID’s or arguments
Tip 3: Add keywords to your site that users will use
Tip 4: Tell google the location of your site > imporove geographic targeting
Tip 5: Get your site crawled at the appropriate crawl rate
Tom was up next and indicated that Ask.com was the #4 Search Engine in the UK.
He then continued by saying that Webmasters can control crawl behaviour by using the “dissallow”, “crawl-delay”, “noarchive”, “noindex” and “nofollow” tags.
He also talked about efficiency, saying that we should compress our websites to save bandwidth and to also avoid duplicate content.
Finally he mentioned that links in images are not effective and is difficult to crawl. High page quality is important to Ask.com
The final speaker, Paul mentioned that Microsoft is the #3 Search Engine in the UK and the one other thing that I thought was worth mentioning was that webmasters and site owners should start off by getting the basics right when it comes to preparing your site for the Web. He suggested using Live’s Webmaster Tools as a beginning to getting your site crawled and indexed in Microsoft’s Live.com
Finally, during the Questions & Answers session someone asked why we have to submit a sitemap for a site if the site is already being crawled. The answer was that it is a good idea to submit more information, the more you give, the more the Search Engines can work with. You can also immediately notify the Search Engines about updates to your site.
The quickest way to get content indexed is to provide content in the quickest loading format like text and HTML – Flash and PDF’s, for instance, takes longer to index.
