The Other Search Engines

**exudotcom** · 08-01-2002, 12:42 PM

I have changed the basic informations of my website such as: title, slogan, description, keywords, etc...

Should i submit my site to all the search engines or should i just wait for their respective crawlers to comeback to my site again?

As i know those search engine and directories have different policies, i would like to know among the major s.e. and directories for which ones should i consider submiting again and for which other ones i should just wait?

thanks in advance!

**Hope** · 08-02-2002, 12:53 PM

If the site has changed completely (new topic) you should go to the directories and advise them of this. You might fall under a new category now. If you are just optimizing to a better keyword selections, you can request a description change.

Re-submitting to the search engines will not hurt you. It is also not necessary if you are being crawled on a regular basis. Check your log files to see when you are being crawled.

If you are not sure when you are being crawled, go ahead and resubmit to search engines, not directories.

**UmojaNetwork** · 08-30-2002, 06:09 PM

Newbie question: what is the log file and where do i find it?

**Hope** · 08-30-2002, 09:36 PM

If you pay for website hosting, you should have log files. A log file is a list of ALL activities on your website. This is located somewhere on your web server. I would suggest you contact your host and ask if you have access to your log files.

If you have any questions on what these files are saying, feel free to ask. I will be happy to answer your questions.

**DaveTodd** · 09-01-2002, 09:20 AM

Hope gives good advice, listen to him.

change of subject / content / any major change should be advised to the directories.

many, if not all, of the search engines, will respider you within a couple of months at the most. then you should see changes occuring. if not, then try to resubmit. no point resubmitting if the changes will happen anyway. but if you will loose traffic, then resubmitting is the best idea.

some submissions to search engines don't work. google for example crawls on links, not by sites submitted. links are the most important. if you have alot of links, you'll get crawled alot more, and you'll get updated more frequently.

links = updates, bear that in mind. follow hopes advice

**UmojaNetwork** · 09-01-2002, 05:50 PM

I will follow his advices but by curiosity, i would liek to know what kind of info i can get in log file and how to read them?

**Hope** · 09-01-2002, 07:01 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by DaveTodd
Hope gives good advice, listen to him.

Hope is a female, not a male.

Quote:

i would liek to know what kind of info i can get in log file and how to read them?

You can find out EVERYTHING that happens on your site in your web logs. When I say everything, I mean everything. If a spider or visitor hits your site it is there. If you have a server error, it is there.

Open a log file in WordPad or equivalent. There are several log file formats, but they all have the same basic information. Below is an entry into a log file:

24.130.85.7 - - [01/Sep/2002:06:08:29 -0500] "GET /glossary.html HTTP/1.1" 200 49973 "http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&ie=ISO-8859-1&safe=off&q=SERP+seo" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)"

24.130.85.7 - IP address of visitor
[01/Sep/2002:06:08:29 -0500] - Date and Time of visit
GET - Action taken (get or post are the most common)
/glossary.html - File that was requested from server
HTTP/1.1 - Protocol (http/1.0 or http/1.1)
200 - server status (200 is a successful transer of data, 404 would be file not on server)
49973 - File size
http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&ie=ISO-8859-1&safe=off&q=SERP+seo - referral (where user came from, in this case google on the search term "SERP + seo"
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1) - Browser and OS info (microsoft IE version 6.0 on a Windows NT5.1 (win 2000) machine.

This is another entry:

64.68.82.55 - - [31/Aug/2002:23:10:04 -0500] "GET /glossary.html HTTP/1.0" 200 49973 "-" "Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)"

This shows that googlebot stopped by to spider the page /glossary.html.

Does this make sense?

**UmojaNetwork** · 09-01-2002, 07:07 PM

I am sorry for thinking you were a male lol

thanks for the log file explanation i will check mine for the spider thing...

**DaveTodd** · 09-02-2002, 06:14 AM

many many apologies Ms Hope

thankx for the info on the log files, i'm gonna go analyse mine now, i've been wondering for a while now how to interpret them, never really sat down and looked at them properly before, but i'll be sure to stop off at them ever once in a while.

incidently, i'm attempting to install modlogan, a webstat program that reports on spiders and many other things, what traffic track programs do you use and what stats do they give you?

**Hope** · 09-02-2002, 02:24 PM

I prefer WebTrends, but it is not cheap. WebTrends is the best for log analysis. I have tried several different programs and haven't liked many of them. Currently I prefer to just read the raw log files. It is time consuming and I know I must be crazy to do it, but what the heck it is something to do. LOL

**UmojaNetwork** · 09-03-2002, 12:09 AM

Webtrends yeah it is not cheap and that free version is about to be closed soon grrrrr