Search Engine Guidelines

Search Engine guidelines are just that - guidelines. Despite what you may read elsewhere, the guidelines are not a blueprint on how to optimise or improve the Search Engine positions of your site. Most of all, Search Engine guidelines are a philosophy for best practise. Search Engines themselves invest huge resources looking for evidence of what could be called "jury tampering" i.e. attempts by web site owners to use deceit to artificially inflate their ranking. This is commonly referred to as spamming - analogous to email spam. And in the Internet Age, spam is like horse thieving in the Wild West - it is not a misdemeanour, but a hanging offence!

In a recent patent application, Google state quite bluntly their view on Search Engine spamming:

This is our game. It may be possible to beat us at it -- for a brief while -- by cheating, but the odds against it are long.

Fortunately the Search Engines themselves publish their guidelines for you to follow and we list these below. We strongly recommend that any company/individual performing SEM becomes familiar with these.

Listed Search Engines are taken from our relationship chart (relationship-chart.htm) and they are all UK based where possible. Effective Aug-2005.

Google

Google Information for webmasters:

http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/webmasters/4.html

http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/webmasters/

Google Guidelines:

http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/webmasters/guidelines.html

Google recommendations about SEO's:

http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/webmasters/seo.html

Overture

http://www.content.overture.com/d/UKm/ac/lg.jhtml

Yahoo!

General help with submission/advertising/FAQs etc:

http://help.yahoo.com/help/uk

Also their Code of Practice -

http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/codeofpractise.html

Information on Slurp (Yahoobot)

http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp/

Information on free submission for crawling:

http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request

MSN

MSN Site Owner Help

Teoma

Nothing on Teoma for free submissions to index.

Paid listings is just a mention on the Ask Jeeves Keyword Network and a contact form.

Inktomi

Lycos submission guidelines also to apply here:

https://inclusion.lycos.com/lycos/account/guidelines.htm

InfoSpace

infospace.co.uk is now the UK version of the dogpile portal (called WebFetch.co.uk). infospace.com has little or no information on submission guidelines, nor anywhere to submit a site. Some of its sub-directories accept submissions, e.g. http://www.switchboard.com. There is also a paid advertising option, but this is all US based.

DMOZ

Submission guidelines at:

http://www.dmoz.org/help/submit.html
More detailed information if you want to know how editors edit:
http://www.dmoz.org/guidelines/

Ask Jeeves

Although Ask Jeeves has stopped the Site Submit program, information is still available at

http://sitesubmit.ask.co.uk/
Information on Ask current advertising programs at:
http://hah.ask.co.uk/docs/about/advertise/index.asp
and http://hah.ask.co.uk/docs/about/advertise/advertising_products.asp

LookSmart

Now runs paid listing program call LookListing:

http://listings.looksmart.com/home/started.jhtml
Guidelines for LookListings:
http://listings.looksmart.com/help/guidelines/index.jhtml?loginState=4
LookSmart Directory - Add sites through ZEAL and only after successfully completing quiz.

Lycos

Paid Listing products at: http://insite.lycos.com/default.asp. This is a standard PPC product plus a Lycos administered system for managing campaigns across all search engines, called BidManager (not yet fully operational)

General submission guidelines here: