Difficulty being index on search engines besides Google!

[AprilS]

I was unsure which forum to post this on. We hired a company a little over a year ago for SEO and search engine submissions...mainly for search engine submissions as we're not too impressed with their seo. (If you want to know who we went with - ask and I will post in a reply).

Anyway, Google shows they have 3,460 of our pages indexed - pretty much everything we have. On the other hand, only a handful of our pages are being indexed in the other search engines..below are a few:

Google: 3,460 pages indexed
HotBot: 15 pages indexed
AltaVisa: 11 pages indexed
Alltheweb: 586 pages indexed

Throughout the past year and a half we kept asking why this is so - and they basically said they were unsure because normally it is the opposite.

We have just left this company cause they charge quite a bit for their service ($80/mo.) and we are going to do our own site submissions - but I want to understand how something like this could happen as I want to take the appropriate steps to get more of our pages indexed in the other search engines.

Does anyone have a clue why this could be? If there is a better forum for this question, could you let me know and I will post there?

[yowza]

Anybody that knows what they are doing with seo shouldn't be charging for submissions. You should only have to submit once, or never. Just get some high PR sites to link to you. You could pay for a link from a high PR site for cheaper than the $80 a month.

[Essex_boy]

Hotbot and Alta Vista I suspect that you have to submit each and every page to them before itll be indexed.

All the web? Not so sure, how long ago was it that they indexed your site?

[AprilS]

From what I've seen in the logs - AllTheWeb is on our site quite often. It seems like every time I check the logs I see an entry from Alltheweb.

Bots like Inktomi are indexing our site constantly. Google is there frequently too - if not every day. Looksmart is also a frequent bot as well.

This month we have been indexed by 32 bots (many of which I don't know).

Our AWStats tools shows how much bandwidth each bot is using - which also gives a rough idea on how much content they are indexing...but that doesn't necessarily mean we are being "indexed". The two highest in our logs are Inktomi Slurp (2.7GB) and Google (2.92GB) - but those bots also index images.

I'm not sure if that answers your question at all.

I just can't figure out why a lot of the search engines are only indexing a few of our pages. The odd things is; when you mentioned that you suspected that with HotBot and Alta Vista each page has to be submitted....the only page that has been submitted to them is the main page...so they have obviously grabbed some pages...just don't know why they've only a handful.

[thehittmann]

alltheweb visits one of my sites many times a day but they will only index my index page.
Google has every page in the index I guess thats just why they are the SE that most of the others get there SERP's from. I keep submitting my pages to alltheweb every few months...nothing ever happens.

[AprilS]

Does anyone else have any theories about this? It sounds like I need to submit every single page to Alta Vista. We have thousands of links - is there a program out there that I can give it a huge list of all of our links and then have it submit to sites manually....that won't upset the search engines? I went to Alta Vista's website and you can only submit 5 URLs at a time w/out reentering their security code...not sure if there is software to bypass this.

[yowza]

I submitted only my home page to AltaVista. They have included 1,000 pages in their index - more than all of the other search engines combined.

As I stated earlier. SEO has nothing to do with submitting your site to the search engines.

Get some good inbound links and make a couple of them go to deep pages.