I recently tried to submit my web site to AltaVista but found that I now had to enter a graphic code before AltaVista accepted my submission. Can you tell me why AltaVista is making people do this?

Rebecca DiSouza


Answer:

Hi Rebecca,

AltaVista now requires you to enter an 8 digit graphic code consisting of letters and digits before your submission is accepted. Here's how this process works. When you submit a site to AltaVista, it automatically generates a unique 8 digit code which you have to read and then type in another text box. If the text that you have typed is the same as the graphic code that AltaVista has displayed, it accepts the submission. In this case, it allows you to submit 4 more pages without having to type any code again. However, if the text is different from the graphic code, the submission is rejected and you have to submit the site again.

The reason that AltaVista does this is simple - it wants to discourage the use of any automatic submission programs. It does this by ensuring that the code is generated graphically and by using different fonts. This ensures that no automatic submission programs can ever find out what code has been generated, which in turn ensures that no one can use automatic submission programs to submit sites to AltaVista.

Now, in principle, I have no objections to AltaVista doing this. I have always discouraged the use of any automatic submission programs. Now that AltaVista has done this, my guess is that many other search engines will follow suit, which will render all automatic submission programs virtually useless.

However, the only problem is that the code that AltaVista generates is often unreadable to the human eye. Some of the letters and digits that are displayed often look very similar to other letters and digits which means that you have to take a guess as to what letter or digit is actually displayed. Another problem arises when it comes to capitalization. The code that AltaVista displays is case sensitive in the sense that the letters have to be entered using the same case as the case used in the code. But, the way that AltaVista displays the letters often makes it very difficult to distinguish between upper case and lower case characters. Once again, you have to take a guess as to whether a particular letter is in lower or upper case. However, I presume that AltaVista will soon get its act together and will make the code more readable to the human eye.


QUESTION 2:

I am a web site designer and have recently developed a web site for a client. The content of the site is generated dynamically from a database. I have heard from some sources that search engines don't like dynamic sites. Can you tell me how I can resolve this issue?

Jon Kendall


Answer:

Hi Jon,

You are right in saying that many search engines refuse to spider dynamically generated pages. The search engines recognize a dynamically generated page by looking at whether the URL of the page contains a "?". If it does, it recognizes the fact that this is a dynamically generated page and may refuse to spider it.

The simplest way of ensuring that dynamically generated pages get spidered is to create static pages from these dynamically generated pages. What you need to do is to take each of the dynamically generated pages in your site, and create a new static HTML page by copying the content of the dynamically generated page into this static page. Do this for all the dynamically generated pages in your site.

Now, you need to ensure that when a search engine spider comes to your site, it can spider all these new static pages that you have created. What you can do is to create a Sitemap page which contains links to all of the individual static pages that you have created. Now, some search engines refuse to spider pages which only contain links to other pages. Hence, if the Sitemap page only contains links to these static pages but contains no other content, the search engines may ignore this page. Hence, what you can do is to add a short description of the content of each of the static pages after you have added a link to that page in the Sitemap page. This ensures that the search engines will not ignore this page.

Lastly, you need to link the Sitemap page with the home page. This ensures that when a search engine spider comes to the home page, it can spider the Sitemap page, and after that, can spider the individual static pages which are linked from the Sitemap page. If you want, you can add a text link from the home page to the Sitemap page. Or, if you don't want any of your human visitors to be able to visit the Sitemap page, you can link the home page with the Sitemap page using a transparent gif image. You can get a sample transparent gif image at http://www.1stsearchranking.net/smallpic.zip You will need a program like Winzip to extract the gif file. You can download Winzip at http://www.winzip.com


QUESTION 3:

I have been told that using Brand Names in Metatags is of questionable legality and can be sued for false representation. Not that I have seen anything go to court, but real estate clients of mine have received threats from large real estate companies. Any info on this, or cases of this sort?

Adam Pascu


Answer:

Hi Adam,

I am no lawyer, but from what I understand, it depends on whether you have a legitimate reason for using the brand names in your meta tags. For instance, suppose I sell toys of a certain brand. Further suppose that I find that a lot of people on the Internet are searching for that brand. Then, in order to get a high ranking in the search engines for that brand, if I include the brand name in my Meta Tags, I don't think I am doing anything wrong. However, if I include the name of a competitor in my meta tags in order to try and get a high ranking in the search engines when someone searches for the name of the competitor, then I think that I am liable to get sued. In any case, simply repeating a keyword in the Meta Tags will not help you get a good ranking in the search engines - you need to have those keywords present in the body of your site as well.

Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Watch has done an excellent job of explaining this issue - have a look at http://www.searchenginewatch.com/resources/metasuits.html and http://www.searchenginewatch.com/sereport/97/09-oppedahl.html

If you have any doubts as to whether you can use a particular brand name in your meta tags, it is best to first consult a lawyer before you proceed.