LYCOS
Lycos 400-2 Totten Pond Rd.
Waltham, MA 02154 (781) 370-2700
Fax: (781) 370-2600 webmaster@ lycos. com

URL to the engine http:// www. lycos. com
Must submit EACH page? OPTIONAL
How long to index my page? 2 - 4 weeks (but may take longer)
Recognizes and supports META tags? NO
Are searches case sensitive? NO
Does a spider index the site? YES
Uses data entered on submission form only? NO
Is page popularity a factor? YES
Alphabetical ranking used? NO
Keyword weight plays a role? YES (first 270 characters or so)
Title tag considered for relevancy? YES
Prominence of keywords in title tag important? YES
Frequency of keywords in title tag important? YES
Comment tags considered for relevancy? NO
Max. length of title accepted UNKNOWN
Max. length of keyword META tag N/ A
Max. length of description field you can submit N/ A
How to check to see if you're listed http:// www. lycos. com/ addasite. html
Checking your link popularity Lycos charges for this service*
E-mail support webmaster@ lycos. com

Total documents indexed 100 million pages indexed - growing
quickly!

Total page views 10 million users a day, ranked by PC
Meter

Add URL http:// www. hotbot. com/ addurl. html

*The Lycos advertising department offers a special service called LinkAlert that includes a detailed report listing all sites linked to yours.

From the Horses Mouth

New interview: We just completed a brief interview with a Lycos contact. We were interested in why it took Lycos so long to add a newly submitted Web site to their database. We experienced a six-month lag last year from submission of a new URL until its appearance in the Lycos database! We had counseled clients and subscribers to this report to simply forget about submitting to Lycos due to this indefensible lag time - but all this appears ready to change.

We asked our contact how frequently Lycos spiders pages and adds them to their index. He became a bit defensive and responded with a canned retort about technical difficulty that caused Lycos not to be able to add pages to their main index as quickly as they should. He explained that Lycos is always spidering and these pages are added to an offline database that is merged with the active
search engine database every so often.

He claimed that Lycos was implementing new technology that would allow newly submitted sites to be added to the Lycos active search engine database in two to three days and that this was expected to be ready by May 1, 1999. It appears that the new technology he was referring to was Lycos' adoption of the Open Directory (http:// www. dmoz. org).

On another occasion we were granted a much longer interview with a more senior search engine manager at Lycos. As with all the search engines, he asked that we not share his name for fear of being flooded with e-mails and phone calls. This Lycos contact shared more valuable information than any other search engine contact with the possible exception of HotBot. If our Lycos contact is reading this (and it's likely that he is), thank you!

Lycos cares that your HTML has been run through an HTML validator. It's not so much that the engine cares that you're writing clean code, it's just that poorly written HTML code could cause your site not to be indexed at all.
Clean HTML is very important - verify the site.
- Our Lycos contact

When we asked this contact about what would help a page to achieve a top ranking, we were told some very interesting things that he claims could be carefully discussed because they were part of "last year's ranking algorithm." He then added that this year's algorithm is not all that different as there are only so many things that can be done to score a page's relevancy. This information is GOLDEN. Read these next few paragraphs carefully. Some of these may apply to other search engines, so take the time to understand this search engine thinking.

Our contact asked us to consider what would make a paper or essay appear relevant to a keyword. He suggested that "the topic would show up in the title, the first paragraph and probably would show up in the last paragraph, too." Wow! Did you hear that? Keywords in the last paragraph will help your relevancy score. This was new information to us.

He continued and explained how many keywords in the document would count to a page's relevance. He suggested that you "write the document in a way that an English teacher would - very hierarchical." We interpret that to mean that each paragraph should have a header tag with keywords and that keywords appear near the tops of each paragraph.

Lycos has a variety of counter-measures for spammers. When Lycos detects double word occurrences, it will assign negative accelerators or "downward relevancy accelerators." If its spider saw, "girl, girl, girl" repeated three times, Lycos might devalue the page even further. The penalty is for duplicate keywords that are next to each other, not for repeated words spread throughout the document. Also, whenever Lycos finds too many duplicate URLs they pull them from their database.

Our Own Experience and Observations

Lycos will not accept ANY punctuation. If your URL contains any non-alpha symbols such as $, ?, =, trouble will arise. Therefore, avoid special symbols in your page names, although a dash (" -") or underscore ("_") should be OK.

WARNING: If your entire site is secure, meaning the URL for the site includes an "https" instead of the standard "http," Lycos will not index your pages. Follow these steps to achieve your top rankings in Lycos:

Step 1:
Build a series of doorway pages.
Do not bother with a META keyword tag as Lycos no longer considers them.

Step 2:
Carefully construct your title tag with your most important keyword first.

Step 3:
Add headline tags that include your targeted keywords. Repeat your important keyword once in a heading tag <H1>. Experiment with keyword seeding in heading tags (e. g., <H1> My Heading Here</ H1> and <H2> My sub heading here </ H2>).

Step 4:
Repeat the keyword again in the first 270 characters on your Web site. Lycos will use this text as the site's description. These first 270 characters on your Web site include the text in the headline tag. You want heading tag keywords before body keywords. Also put the heading (< H1>) tag before any ALT tags. What this means is that if you have an image with an ALT tag before your header tag, you're losing points. More important, make sure text in the ALT tag is part of the first 270 characters and will become part of Lycos' site description!

Step 5:
Add synonyms of your most important keywords. Lycos considers synonyms of your keywords. Review the words on the viewable area of your page and in your site title. Also, make sure you have synonyms of your keywords in your sentences and in heading tags specifically.

Step 6:
Increase your page's popularity score by soliciting links. Lycos considers your page's popularity (the number of other Web sites that have established links to your site), so attempt to solicit links from others to help your relevancy.

Step 7:
Keep your doorway pages short for Lycos. There is merit in shorter doorway pages in Lycos. Try some one-paragraph pages as well as some with several paragraphs, and remember to build pages that discuss a theme and are built in the same hierarchical way that you might compose a high school essay.

Step 8:
Add keywords to the first few words of your last paragraph. Lycos looks for keywords near the top and near the end of your documents. Make sure that your important keywords appear in the first line of the last paragraph of your page. You might try including that keyword again in the last sentence.

Need more power?

1. Try using the multiple <TITLE> tag technique in Lycos.
2. Lycos recognized plurals as synonyms - this means you can include your targeted keyword's plural form as synonyms.

3. More and more search engines are giving Web sites that they've reviewed a bump-up in rankings. While Lycos does not claim to have a formal editorial review contact, we suggest
that you submit your suggestion that they review your site using the form on this page:
http:// echomail. lycos. com/ feedback. htm
4. Lycos favors newly submitted pages. Resubmit your pages to Lycos once a week for a potential bump-up in ranking.

5. Lycos favors pages that place the keywords near the top of the page in the first 25 words of the Web page.