C O O L P A G E H E L P . C O M - The Official Help Website for Cool Page Users

Important - Choose a Good Host

A very common reason that websites do not get listed at search engines is because the website is being hosted by a free webhost. Many free webhosts are slow and overloaded and cannot keep up with the demand placed upon them by users. A fast reliable webhost will increase your chances of getting indexed by search engines. Many search engines will NOT index pages on free Hosts servers.

Search Engine Tips

1. First, be sure you're not already indexed but just don't know it. Unfortunately, none of the major engines are kind enough to e-mail or notify you as to if and when you've been indexed.

The method to determine if a page or domain has been indexed varies from one engine to another, and in many cases, it's difficult to tell for sure. Never assume that you're not indexed just because you searched for a bunch of keywords and you never came up in the first few pages of results. You could be in there but burried near the bottom.

2. Make sure you have uploaded the pages to your site before submitting them. This one seems obvious, but submitting a page that does not exist or submitting with a subtle typo in the URL is a goof we might all make at one time or another.

3. If your webhost is a slow one or the pages are very complex and take a long time to load, it might time out before the spider can index all the text. For the benefit of your visitors and the search engines, limit your page size to less than 60K. Many free webhosts are often slow and overloaded. For this reason it is recommended that you use a fast reliable webhosting service. There are many such services available. Cool Page is affiliated with a webhosting service called EZHoster.com, which is optimized for the
Cool Page program.

4. Search engine spiders cannot index sites that require any kind of registration or password. A spider cannot fill out a form of any kind.

5. Dynamic pages often block spiders. In fact, any URL containing special symbols like a question mark (?) or an ampersand (&) will be ignored by many engines.

6. Most engines cannot index text that is embedded in graphics. Text that appears in multimedia files (audio and video) cannot be indexed by most engines. Information that is generated by Java applets cannot be indexed by most engines.

7. Framesets - It is generally stated that spiders will not in many cases index the content of the pages in a framed website. Cool Page has built in features to help overcome this liability. Some facts:

• Some search engines DO walk the pages of a framed website.

• Other search engines walk the links on the page, and Cool Page always puts a link to the DEFAULT frame in the <FRAMESET> html code. The DEFAULT frame is defined in Frame Set in Edit menu.

• To be very sure, users should submit the urls of all of the frameset pages. For instance, if your frameset has 1 row and 2 columns, Cool Page will create 3 webpages. The frameset page (index.html), the left frame (indexrow1col1.html) and the right frame (indexrow1col2.html). Each of the url's for those pages should be submitted to the search engine.

• A new feature has been added to Cool Page to ensure that your framed pages will always appear within the frameset page. What that means is if someone clicks a link to your indexrow1col2.html then that page will automatically load within the index.html frameset page. Viewers will always see your framed website as you intended! This feature is called "Force Load In Frameset".

When using "Forced Load in FrameSet" it is important that user submit the sub-frame (indexrowXcolX.html) pages to the search engines, as well as the main frame set page (index.html). This is because the <NOFRAMES> tag gets wrapped inside <NOSRIPT> tag and search engines may miss the link to the Default frame.

And this is good practice any way, even if not using "Forced Load in FrameSet".

Also using "Forced Load in FrameSet" is actually the best way to deal with search engines, as it will insure that when search engines link to your sub-frames, then visitor will always see the page as intended in the
complete frame set.

8. If you submit just your home page, don't expect a search engine to travel more than one or two links away from the home page or the page that you submitted. Over time they may venture deeper into your site, but don't count on it. You'll often need to submit pages individually that appear further down into your site or have no link from the home page.

9. If your Web site fails to respond when the search engine spider pays a visit, you will not be indexed. Even worse, if you are indexed and they pay a visit when your site is down, you'll often be removed from their database! Therefore, it pays to have a reliable hosting service that is up 99.5% of the time.

10. If you have ever used any questionable techniques that might be considered an overt attempt at spamming (i.e., excessive repetition of keywords, same color text as background), an engine may ignore or reject your submissions. If you're having trouble getting indexed in the expected amount of time, make sure your site is spam-free.

11. If you're submitting to a directory site like Yahoo, Open Directory, NBCi, Looksmart, or others, then a human being will review your site. They must decide the site is of sufficient "quality" before they will list it.

12. A number of engines no longer index pages residing on many common free web hosting services. The common complaint from the engines is that they get too many "junk" or low-quality submissions from free web site domains. Therefore, they often choose not to index anyone from those domains or they limit submissions from them.
It's always best to buy your own domain name (very important) and place it on a respected, paid hosting service to avoid being discriminated against.

13. Make sure you're submitting within the recommended limits. Some engines do not like more than a certain number of submissions per day for the same domain. If you exceed the limit, you may find that all your submissions are ignored. Check the guidelines and rules of each search engine at their websites.

14. Last but not least, sometimes the engines just lose submissions at random through technical errors and bugs. Therefore, some people like to resubmit once or twice a month for good merit in case they do lose a submission. Certainly if you've followed all the "rules" and are still not listed, re-submit! Sometimes a little persistence is all that's needed.