What to Do If Your Pages Disappear : How to restore ranking to your buried site

Apparently, Excite's spider cycles through recently submitted sites or existing sites in its database every couple of weeks. It prefers to start with the home page, and follow links from there. Once it finds 25 pages, it adds them to its index, but then drops all the rest of the pages for that Web site!

Which pages it chooses to keep is somewhat random. This means that important doorway pages can get dropped, and unimportant pages may stay. One solution is to add the following tag to your less important pages that don't need to be indexed:
<meta name=" robots" content=" noindex">

This tag is placed in the HEAD section at the top of the page with other meta tags. It tells all search engines that honor the tag (including Excite) not to index this page. If you tell the search engine to exclude all pages except your most important 24 doorway pages, and your home page, then those pages should stay indexed. This occurs because all other pages can't be re-indexed because of the noindex tag.

The disadvantage to the "noindex" technique is that it limits you to just 25 pages on many other engines that read the noindex tag. Most engines normally support more than 25 pages. Ideally, you should create a separate Web site domain for Excite using the "noindex" tags on all but 25 pages, and another domain that allows engines to spider the whole site.

You could experiment with creating a separate sub-directory of pages for Excite on your existing domain, but Excite generally doesn't rank pages in sub-directories as well as those in the root directory.

The Importance of Keywords in Link Text

Excite changed their ranking algorithm in January 1999. It appears the <TITLE> tag now has significantly less influence than before. However, pages using keywords in the link text areas often rank substantially higher. In fact, we did searches and keyword counts that showed a definite progression of top ranking pages generally having more keyword repetitions in the links.

Some of these pages had 20 or more links with keywords in them! Our suggestion is to look at a couple of the top ranking pages for your keyword and make sure you use the keyword more often in the link text area. This has produced dramatically improved rankings for many people.

For those new to HTML, the link text we are referring to is that highlighted text which hyperlinks to another page when clicked on. Generally this text is underlined in blue by default.