Inside Guide to Getting Listed on Excite

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In Depth Analysis

The Lowdown: Excite has been in a constant state of flux for several months' now. Major updates to the algorithm and the ranking process have been just around the corner for at least that long, but that corner seems to be as far away as ever. In fact, Excite is moving further and further away from its search engine roots with a bewildering array of additional services, from free email to sports scores. Despite all these problems, Excite is going to become a vital traffic generator through its aggressive partnership tie-ups with other sites.

Excite seems to take almost sadistic pleasure in mangling descriptions. Time and again, sites will appear with totally irrelevant summaries, culled from a fairly random assortment of text from the given page. There is not much you can do about this (although see the Submission Tips section above) so it is vital that your title tells the whole story. This is even more relevant since the description is also used by WebCrawler.

A Tip: Actually, the selection process is not quite as random as it first appears. Excite places more weight on text further down a page (<sarcasm>because after all, who would even think of putting the important stuff at the top</sarcasm>) so if you have a 2-3 line block of text near the bottom of the page summarising the content of that page it stands a good chance of getting it indexed. You could add the same 2-3 line block of text as a hidden comment directly above the visible block to improve your chances still further.

Partnerships: Netscape-branded search engine running above Excite database, to receive 25% of traffic to Netscape's site; Excite itself will receive 25% of Netscape's traffic, giving the search engine a total of half the traffic heading to one of the most popular sites on the Web.

Excite Channels: Excite runs a series of Channels, containing sites that have been selected for their quality. It is very difficult to get a listing, but your first step should be to send a comment via Excite's Feedback page. Make the comment very brief: The title of your site and its URL, a description of your site in one or two lines, a one-paragraph summary explaining what is unique about your site and an indication of which Channel you would like to be listed under. Be prepared to have your description butchered down to a handful of words, even if you get listed. Persevere, but wait 2-3 weeks between each attempt otherwise you will just be seen as a nuisance.

Worth Noting

AOL uses a mildly modified version of Excite called AOL Netfind. Although they claim to be two different entities, the results they return are so similar it's not worth quibbling about the differences. Excite also owns Magellan (a once-proud directory that has been steadily gathering dust since the takeover) and WebCrawler.