Excite at a Glance
Size
Spider Class
Meta Tag support
Frame support
Image Map support
Alt Text support
HTML Comments
Url Searching
Embedded Directory
Submission URL
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30 Million Urls (approx)
Shallow
Partial
No
No
No
No
No
Yes
Submit
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SUBMISSION POLICY
Excite has no posted policy in regard to spamming or spoofing of their spider. Nor do they have any policy regarding the number of submissions you can make. Again, it should be noted that just because a search engine doesn't post a policy regarding spam/spoofing, it does not mean they will take no action.
Excite has partnered with LookSmart and as a result it appears as if Excite costs $199.00 (US) to submit to the search engine. This is not true. While Excite obtains its directory services from LookSmart, the primary database is still free to submit to. You just have to dig for it, or click here.
Be careful! Many search engines are partnering with LookSmart, who charges a $199.00 (US) or a $99.00 (US) submission fee. If you submit to LookSmart once, do not pay for a second submission.
HTML FACTS
Excite indexes all visible page text, but ignores alt text, comments and the keywords Meta tag. Additionally Excite does not support frames, nor client side imagemaps.
Not too long ago, Excite made a radical shift in their policy towards Meta Tags. In its original version Excite ignored both the keywords and description Meta tags. But instead of relying on the opening text within a page, Excite used an artificial intelligence routine to figure out what your page was about and it used that text in its summary.
Needless to say, this led to many complaints and many many unhappy webmasters. However all that has changed. Excite now supports the Meta Description tag. If your page includes that tag, it will use the tag contents to summarize your website. Should you omit the description tag, Excite's artificial intelligence routine will come into play. At that point your summary is in the hands of fate and luck.
RANKING METHODS
Excite has this to say about their ranking methods. (see ref.)
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.
The key here is simple. Excite wants pages which are focused on a single topic. This is not always easy to achieve. In some cases it would be best to keep your pages very small, thus limiting the topics available to Excite on a single page. It should be obvious at this point that a page which contains no text, such as many flash enabled websites, will not rank well in Excite. Clearly their focus is on the text they find on the page.
Excite also boosts ranking of a site based on the number of external links pointing to it as well as whether or not its received a review in their directory system.
The entry below shows a typical example of an Excite listing from a site with a Meta Description tag.
73%
Northern Webs - North Idaho's Premier Web Design Studio
- Northern Webs, North Idaho's most experienced Web Design studio.
http://www.northernwebs.com/
Search for more documents like this one
SUMMARY
Thanks to Excite's change of heart in regard to meta tags, we've moved Excite out of the doghouse for search engines. Although small in comparison to other search engines, Excite is strategically positioned, they are the search engine of choice for AOL, and that alone makes them a force to be reckoned with.
Get listed in Excite!
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