March 1, 2007 | Posted By : Paul Hirsch at 9:53 AM PERMALINK | Blog Comments (2)

Do Search Engines Index That?

I've recently involved myself in a series of experiments aimed at getting a better understanding of how search engines function. Our first experiment is complete and published. I hope Web masters find this interesting and useful!

**********

Approximately four months ago, a small group of Web developers representing the International Web Developers Network (IWDN) devised an interesting search engine experiment. The question had been raised whether the text within a link's title attribute gets picked up by search engines or not. None of us knew the answer, and before long, we discovered we didn't know the answer to a lot of questions regarding how search engines index text in HTML.

The purpose of this experiment was to see which methods of presenting information on a Web site would get picked up by search engines and which methods would be ignored.

Read article test cases and results.

###

==========[ MORE ABOUT PAUL ]==========

PaulHirsch.com . International Web Developers Network . Web Hosting Talk . Equentity Host

Print | Send | del.icio.us | Linking Blogs

Comments

[Add Comment]

How long did they had to wait before results started appearing in the search engines ?

# Posted By Web developers | 3/2/07 6:14 AM

The results started appearing within a couple days of posting those pages. We let the test pages sit and stew for ~four months before reporting anything or drawing conclusions, just to make sure search engines weren't planning on coming back to finish indexing later.

# Posted By Paul Hirsch | 3/4/07 5:12 PM

[Add Comment]