HotBot Search

HotBot is a favorite among researchers due to its many powerful searching features. In most cases, HotBot's first page of results comes from the Yahoo! Search Engine Service, while sponsored results come from Google Adwords.

HotBot also receives its directory listings from the Google Directory, which is the DMOZ Directory, and gets it's rankings using Google's PageRank System. Secondary listings are provided to HotBot by Inktomi.

HotBot Search Submission

The easiest way to get your web site listed in the HotBot Index is to submit your site to Yahoo!, as HotBot uses Yahoo!’s organic search listings as their main results. HotBot’s organic results also come from Inktomi, so if you are an Inktomi subscriber, you need not subscribe to HotBot.

Being as HotBot is a sister to Lycos (who merged with Terra, a European search engine, to form Terra Lycos), when you submit your web site directly to HotBot you are physically moved to a Lycos page.

Go to HotBot Submission Page to see.

When you submit to HotBot’s directory, it physically moves you to the Open Directory’s site, so you may as well just submit to The ODP directly.

After submission, it may take approximately three to four weeks before the HotBot spider visits your site, then subsequent visits will be about every 60 days.

More about HotBot and your web site

HotBot has developed the annoying habit of dropping URL's for no apparent reason. They say that this could be due to "any number of techniqueal reasons" and suggest that if this happens to your site, you resubmit.

If the content, meta tags, and other parts of your page have changed and you still have the same URL, you do not want to resubmit your URL on the “Submit a Web Site” page. That page is strictly for sites not already in the database, and HotBot ignores resubmissions of URLs already in the index.

If your URL has changed, the old URL will be removed when HotBot’s spider revisits your domain and sees that the information for your old web page no longer exists. Or, if it finds a robots.txt file, it will remove the information from its database.

If you do not want your website listed in HotBot, you either have to remove it from the net all together, us a robots.txt file or appropriate meta tag. Once the spider sees it no longer exists, is told not to index by a robots.txt file or that it has a <meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow"> tag, it will remove the site from the database.

HotBot and Penalties

HotBot promises severe penalties for sites which spam or spoof, meaning sites with:

• Persistent re-submission of identical pages
• Meta keywords which are not relevant to content of the document
• Senseless repetition of words
• Use of tiny or invisible text
• Misleading keywords

HotBot Search Engine Position Ranking Tips

• Use pertinent keywords in the title, meta tag and body.
• Use precise and uncommon words.
• Remember, word frequency is calculated by ratio, not actual times on a page.
• Keep your key words relevant to the topic of the page.
• HotBot will not index pages that require a cookie.
• The characters: ?, =, % and & are not recognized in the URL.

In order to rank well in Inktomi ...

• Use keywords in the title and meta tags
• Use a high frequency of keywords in the body
• Use shorter documents

Inktomi is a crawling spider technology and that means any submission will lead to the full site being indexed. You can submit up to 50 pages to Inktomi through HotBot however, Inktomi will not index pages that are substantially duplicated.

Submission Times - Initially, it can take up to 2 months to get spidered into the Inktomi database through HotBot. Inktomi re-spiders every page in its database on a monthly basis.

The best thing to remember is that you must have suitable URL content and be engineered to beat your competition within HotBot before you register your pages. Just registering with HotBot does not assure a suitable ranking.

Learn more about Why you need Website Search Engine Optimization to truly suceed online.

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