Web Site Ranking Tips --> HotBot

HotBot boasts a large database of 110 million web pages.

HotBot submission service has been flaky at the best of times during the past three months. They seem to be leaving their submission page up so the general public thinks that they are submitting to them and then they let the submission go off into cyberspace some place and never spider, list or rank the submitted page. This has been an on again, off again situation so the only way you can tell if your page has been spidered is to watch your log files. If you do not know how to do this then click here for a lot of good information. HotBot states that it will take up to two weeks to index a page that is submitted to them and it is taking all of that lately - a far cry from what it was a couple of months ago, before they were bought out by Lycos. It used to be two days. HotBot will allow you to submit all the pages on your site but once again do not over do it. Try to keep submissions down to 20 per day and keep your eyes on your logs. Make sure you are getting visited by "Slurp" their spider. Here are a few hints on how to get better rankings on HotBot.

Key #1
HotBot does what is called full page indexing. What this means is that it will look at all of the text on your page and rank it accordingly. Most major search engines have gone this route. The visiting spider will first look at your title tag and try to figure out what your site is about (so put key words in the title). They will next look at your meta description tag and try to pick out key words from that. Then the spider will look at your Meta keyword tag and take these keywords and look for them in the body of your text on the page. HotBot does give weight to the words in this tag so do not over do it. If you have one hundred keywords in this tag then any given one has very little weight. We recommend no more that six key words or phrases.

Key #2
Next thing the spider will look at is the text in the main body of the page. Repeat your key words or phases often but do not go overboard. HotBot's algorithms where designed by some of the best engineers in the business (my opinion) and are extremely difficult to get a grasp of. What seems to work in one instance does not work in the next and this can get very frustrating for the professionals, so I can only imagine what the novice must think. The only real hint we can give here is to try and balance your key elements and do not over do it. The key elements are: Title tag, Meta Description tag, Meta keyword tag and body text, in that order.

Key #3
HotBot does not index Alt image tags but does look at text between comment tags so you can use these to get in more keywords and text. Do not, however, use hidden or tiny text because they consider this a spam technique and will penalize your page heavily. They also do not mind Meta refresh tags to redirect clients but keep the refresh timer to 5 seconds or better.

Key #4
If you have a frames site make sure you use the "NOFRAMES " tag and put text in those tags letting the spider know what your site is about. HotBot does not spider frames and the only way for the spider to know what is in your site is the " NOFRAMES" tag.

We will go into HotBot affiliation with Inktomi and the use of their database on another page devoted to Inktomi.

Click here to go directly to the HotBot submission page.
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