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1) According to Altavista's FAQ you can only submit no more than 5 subdomain or URLS. That includes subdomian and/or subdirectories. If you want more than 5 domain URLS or subdomains indexed you have to call Altavista... where they probably ask for some $.
subdomain being: www.{keyword}.{mydomain}.com
URL being: www.{mydomain}.com/{keyword}
I was reading on the web the other day that with those large free web hosting sites like geocity etc that only the first few submissions in a day to a search engine are indexed which realtes to my question in 1) above or that submissions are being ignored altogether. Is this true?
Is the url/ subdomain issue a generic case with other search engines?
I have about 40 web sites that I would like to submit to search engines. These are domains hosted on my web site either as subdomians or directories. Do I have to register more domain names to break past the 5 domain URL's or directories that say Altavista talks about in there FAQ?
2) When I submit my sites to search engines I either submit the subdomain and/or index.html page. I was under the impression that the search engines will then come back to my web site and crawl through all the pages. What I am finding is that the search engines are only indexing the main index page of the domain or the page I submit (before you make the comment... I am using the specific crawl submission on the search engines not the individual pages sections if they apply). Am I supposed to cycle-through and submit all the pages on my web site individually like some deep-submit submission sites suggest?
3) I use automatic search engine submissions scripts which are either free or I have purchased to submit multiple subdomains/urls's to search engines. Do the search engines track the IP address of either the domains or the site submitting the submission? If this is the case how can I get around this delema? Do I need to submit from a different IP address to where my web sites are housed? Can the submitting IP address be faked through cgi scripts or the likes if it is an issue?
4) If it is necessary for me to regester mutliple domains to get around the subdomain issue is it highly sueested to register www.{domain}.com names that include keywords? I see so many sites with high ranking in search engines that don't have the keywords in the domain name at all. In some places I can see that the web sites were cloaking the pages but in other cases it seems legit.
5) I use Webpostion gold for designing doorway pages. I am looking for a starting place where I can find some excellent templates to work from for specific search engines, namely altavista, hotbot, excite etc etc (the top 20 or so search engines). I don't mind paying for them provided the price is right and the templates do actually work well without penalising me with too many keywords in wrong places for each search engine.
Sorry about the long message. These questions have been boiling over in my mind for some time and with the timeframe of 3 months or more to get indexed in search engines makes it very hard to take the 'wait and see attitudes' to my testing. I would appreciate very much answers to all my questions or even a few of them. I am sure that answers to these questions will help others understand as to why they might not be getting ranked very well in search engines.
Regards,
Stephen Andrews, BE(Elect)
Welcome to Webmasterworld. You certainly have some well thought out questions in regards to submitting your sites.
>>1) According to Altavista's FAQ you can only submit no more than 5 subdomain or URLS. That includes subdomian and/or subdirectories. If you want more than 5 domain URLS or subdomains indexed you have to call Altavista... where they probably ask for some $.
I've not seen any difficulties with having more than 5 subdomains/directories. Just make sure to space out the submission so that there is not more than 5 per site per day.
>>2) When I submit my sites to search engines I either submit the subdomain and/or index.html page. I was under the impression that the search engines will then come back to my web site and crawl through all the pages.
Some search engines do a great job of deep crawling (googlebot being best) while others need individual submission (AV). Most other SE's do an intermittent job of crawling. Seeing as there are not that many major search engines, your most important pages/domains could easily be submitted by hand while the 2nd tier SE's could be used via automatic submitters. Just try to keep the number per engine/domain at around 5 per day.
>>Do the search engines track the IP address of either the domains or the site submitting the submission? If this is the case how can I get around this delema? Some are using cookies as well as ip address when submitting. However if you are keeping things around the above mentioned numbers per day, you shouldn't have a problem. If you are going to be submitting more, consider using dial-up accounts and erasing cookies after submitting.
>>4) If it is necessary for me to regester mutliple domains to get around the subdomain issue is it highly sueested to register www.{domain}.com names that include keywords?
This is open for debate but it certainly can't hurt to have the keyword in the domain :).
>>5) I use Webpostion gold for designing doorway pages. I am looking for a starting place where I can find some excellent templates to work from for specific search engines, namely altavista, hotbot, excite etc etc (the top 20 or so search engines). Yes, we would all like to find this, but with categories being so much different in competitiveness, etc. There really isn't a one size fits all template.
A couple of resources which may be of great help to you include reading the extensive material available at [searchengineworld.com...] and using the "site search" in the top left corner of your screen here at Webmasterworld. Chances are you will find some good related material pertaining to your questions.
My habit is to submit the index page as [mysite.com...] and to submit all of the major pages from the site. Although most SEs claim they will deep crawl, the ones that do can take forever to do it.
There have been numerous discussions about various submission programs and scripts and I suggest you do some searching (use "site search" at the top of this page) and reading to see what others are using and why. Beginners are usually cautioned against this type of software for various reasons, most commonly because it's easy to abuse.
A few SEs may still give a slight boost for keywords in a domain name so if you find a name that fits and it's available, register it. But don't go out of your way on this one.
Most SEs are penalizing or banning for duplicate content when they detect it. Today's doorway pages need to be more sophisticated then the classic "blue line" pages WPG used to produce.
In depth answers to all of your questions as well as other peoples good and bad experiences are available here at WebmasterWorld. But you'll need to do some digging and a lot of reading. Your questions imply that you have a great deal to learn and you'd be well served by learning a bit more before attempting extensive, serious promotion.
Good Luck!
Looks like eljefe3 and I were responding at the same time!
