Lesson 6

Search engines and directories are both important to an overall searching strategy. Both have advantages and disadvantages that make each useful in particular type of searches. Directory categories provide a way to perform a search without ever typing in a search query. Directories also return fewer, hand-selected results. search engines return many more results, but not all are useful or even relevant. Often even a simple keyword-only search will produce some usable results.

Now that you have finished this module, you should be able to:

1. Describe how Directories are created and organized
2. Describe how a Search Engine creates and maintains its database of sites
3. Ask a Search Engine to find information
4. Explain how a Search Engine's database affects your results

1. robot: An automated program used by search services to follow and record Web links and index documents found on Web sites. The information is stored on a database for user searching.
2. Spider: A program that automatically fetches Web pages. Spiders are used to feed pages to search engines. It's called a spider because it crawls over the Web. Another term for these programs is webcrawler.
3. Web index: A composite statistic designed and produced by the World Wide Web Foundation. The Web Index is the first multi-dimensional measure of the World Wide Web's contribution to development and human rights globally. It covers 81 countries, incorporating indicators that assess the areas of universal access.

The next module discusses simple and advanced searching techniques, including ways to limit and expand a search so you get more of the results you want.

Low quality directory links: These are a frequent source of manipulation for many in the SEO field. A large number of pay-for-placement web directories exist to serve this market and pass themselves off as legitimate, with varying degrees of success. Google often takes action against these sites by removing the PageRank score from the toolbar (or reducing it dramatically), but will not do this in all cases. There are many more manipulative link building tactics that the search engines have identified. In most cases, they have found algorithmic methods for reducing their impact. As new spam systems emerge, engineers will continue to fight them with targeted algorithms, human reviews, and the collection of spam reports from webmasters and SEOs.

Click the Quiz link below to review some topics that we have covered in this module.
Directory Category - Quiz