Search Engines and Index Page Links?

[Alex Ethridge]

I am new at this and if my suggestion/question has been made[nbsp][nbsp]before, please excuse this.[nbsp][nbsp]But, I do need sme input on it.

I understand that some search engines also search links within a site.[nbsp][nbsp]I use UBB at my site and would like to see some of my topics come up in the search engines.

This is my idea:
I am thinking of placing hypertext links on my index page.[nbsp][nbsp]These links would refer to each and every one of my html files in my ubb/Forumx/HTML/xxxxxxxx.html files (where the Xs stand for the various forum numbers and topic numbers.[nbsp][nbsp]These links would be simply that--links with no clickable text.[nbsp][nbsp]Or, do I need the clickable text for my purpose?

If I do need clickable text, I guess it could be white on white; there is really no need for the visitors to be able to read those links.

Well, what do you think?

[Ron]

Hi, Alex. Virtually all of the search engines will spider links, but some take a very long time to do so. AV's deep crawl typically takes about two months, slightly less than that for Excite. But, yea, it will eventually happen.

I have never tried to use a link without clickable text. I would NOT suggest using white on white (or any similar combination) because most of the search engines will not index it. Some will even penalize. That's an old trick for spamming the engines, loading your pages with keywords that the visitors never see, and none of the SE's approve.

There is no reason the page with the links has to be your index page, though. I would create a non-visited page (and would just use UBB to generate it) and just submit that to the search engines. The downside is a visitor "might" find the page in the SE and visit it (so include a link to your home page, just in case). The upside is you can put in all your links without worrying about how they look. And, eventually, the search engines will follow them all...

HTH...

[Alex Ethridge]

Hi, Ron.

Thanks for all the good information and especially the information about their penalizing for white on white in some cases.

After I posted here, I went ahead with the idea and made it white on white.[nbsp][nbsp]I'll go back and change it to light grey or even yellow.[nbsp][nbsp]I'll put a line across the page along with a message to the users that unless they are a search engine there is no useful data below.[nbsp][nbsp]Might be a good idea to put a lot of carriage returns in between.

At this time, my index page is so very simple that I don't think this would detract from it at all, especially if the clickable links are far down on the page, in the smallest font and in light yellow.[nbsp][nbsp]I don't think most people would even scroll down that far.

Any more input you'ld like to give would be greatly appreciated.

[DKG]

Alex,
I hope you're still reading this thread...

Any time you want to hide a link, all you need to do is this:[nbsp][nbsp]Rather than using text, use a *transparent gif link...

<a href=&quot;http://page you want indexed.htm&quot;><img src=&quot;mynew.gif&quot; border=&quot;0&quot; height=&quot;1&quot; width=&quot;1&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;></a>[nbsp][nbsp]

If someone actually mouses over it, they'll get a hand cursor, but if it's only 1 x 1 or even 2 x 2, that's not easy to do.[nbsp][nbsp]Try putting it on the lower left of the page, people don't mouse there often. : )

(*In case you or anyone else is unfamiliar with them...You simply create a one pixel (e.g. black) gif, and when saving, make that color transparent. Save it under any name you wish.[nbsp][nbsp]They are used a lot for sizing table cells and to arrange other page elements by using the height/width or, preferably, hspace, vspace attributes.)

erm, typo...<!-- NO_AUTO_LINK -->
[This message has been edited by DKG (edited 08-09-99)]