* June 4 - Teoma returns and crawls 590 pages! No others.

* June 5 - Teoma returns and crawls 1902 pages! No others. * June 6 - Teoma returns and crawls 290 pages. No others. * June 7 - Teoma returns and crawls 471 pages. No others.

* June 8-14 Odd spider behavior, looking at robots.txt only.

* June 15 - Slurp gets thirsty, gulps 1396 pages! No others.

* June 16 - Slurp still thirsty, gulps 1379 pages! No others.

So we'll take a break here at 5 weeks point and take note of very different behavior of top crawlers. Googlebot visits once and looks at a substantial number of pages but doesn't return for over a month. Slurp finds bad links and seems addicted to them as it stops crawling good pages until it is told to lay off bad liquor, er that is links by getting robots.txt to slap slurp to its senses. MSNbot visits looking for that robots.txt and won't crawl any pages until told what NOT to do by robots.txt file. Teoma just crawls like crazy, takes breaks, then comes back for more.

This behavior may imitate differing personalities of software engineers who designed them. Teoma is tenacious and hard working. MSNbot is timid and needs instruction and some reassurance it is doing right thing, picks up pages slowly and carefully. Slurp has addictive personality and performs erratically on a random schedule. Googlebot takes a good long look and leaves. Who knows whether it will be back and when.

Now let's look at indexing by each engine. As of this writing on July 7, each engine also shows differing indexing behavior as well. Google shows no pages indexed although it crawled 250 pages nearly two months ago. Yahoo has three pages indexed in a clear aging routine that doesn't list any of nearly 8,000 pages it has crawled to date (not all itemized above.) MSN has 187 pages indexed while crawling fewer pages than any of others. Ask Jeeves has crawled more pages to date than any search engine, yet has not indexed a single page.

Each of engines will show number of pages indexed if you use query operator "site:publish101.com" without quotes. MSN 187 pages, Ask none, Yahoo 3 pages, Google none.

The daily activity not listed in three weeks since June 16 above has not varied dramatically, with Teoma crawling a bit more than other engines, Slurp erratically up and down and MSN slowly gathering 30 to 50 pages daily. Google is absent.

Linking campaign has been minimal with posts to discussion lists, a couple of articles and some blog activity. Looking back over this time it is apparent that a listing delay is actually quite sensible from view of search engines. Our site restructuring and bobbled robots.txt implementation seems to have abruptly stalled crawling but indexing behavior of each engine displays distinctly differing policy by each major player.

The sandbox is apparently not just Google's playground, but it is certainly tiresome after nearly two months. I think I'd like to leave for home, have some lunch and take a nap now.

Back to class before we leave for day kiddies. What did we learn today? Watch early crawler activity and be certain to implement robots.txt early and adjust often for bad bots. Oh yes, and sandbox belongs to all search engines.

Buying Links Buying links is also becoming more commonplace. It is a form of purchased advertising that is less obvious than banner adverts or pay per click listings. Often link will be placed on multiple pages, or all pages within site. If purchasing a link, make sure you are clear about why are you buying it? Is it for search engine ranking purposes only, or to get traffic directly from link?

Make sure link is worth what you are paying in terms of traffic it will send you and not solely to improve your page’s ranking. If link partners page is well ranked in search engines under a specific key phrase but receives few visitors, it won’t be sending many visitors to your web site. If page is well ranked, it may help with your ranking in Google and rest, but that would be icing on cake.

Forums Join forums and discussion groups related to your business and place links to your web site in your signature line. Use your main search terms as link text. But before spending time writing lots of posts with your signature line in each post, make sure that forum is spiderable by checking robots.txt file. Also make sure that links in signature lines are not hidden from spiders (view source code to make sure that signature links are in plain HTML and point directly to site).

Link Exchange Centres Find and join free link exchange centres like LinkPartners.com. There you can find a categorised directory of websites that also want to exchange links. Be careful not to sign up with FFA (Free-For-All) sites because they are mostly email address gatherers and you can expect a sudden increase in email sp@m soon after you sign up. Also, only sign up with centres where you can approach other sites personally, and where they can approach you personally.

Controlling Your Links When providing your link partners with text to use in your inbound link, make sure it contains key phrase you are targeting. Search engines will take into account words that are included in actual link as well at text around it so include a brief paragraph about your business and if possible link your top key phrase to your URL. Make sure that each link points to page you are promoting for that particular search term. This should improve your ranking in their listings.

Pointing all links to your home page, with various target search terms, won't achieve same as pointing targeted links at specific pages within site.

How not to link Under no circumstances join any link farms! Link farms, such as LinksToYou.com, sound simple and effective, but search engines, Google in particular, disapprove of them as blatant attempts to manipulate rankings and they will penalise sites that use them. Once a site has been penalised, it is very difficult to get penalty lifted, so avoid all link farms at all costs.

Search engine software engineers always look for spam tactics, when a software engineer discovers a link farm; all domains in link farm are banned. Result? Link popularity vanishes.

Summary Acquiring links can be time-consuming and tedious. There are a number of ways to get them, some being easier than others. However you get them, inbound links are important for websites that want to move up rankings. Inbound links, with right link text, are essential for achieving top rankings when there is any competition for search terms.

Link development's main advantage is dynamic, cumulative, and difficult to imitate. Many sites maintain search engine visibility and resulting qualified traffic because of successful link development, not just based on number of keywords on a page.

For top rankings, it is essential to take time to get as many quality inbound links as possible. It should be treated as an ongoing task. Getting your first link is like getting your first sale. It is just as hard - and just as satisfying.

Linking strategies are just one of a wide range of subjects covered in our guide “Start at Beginning”. It covers all basics of building and optimising your web site for both your customers and organic search engine rankings. For an excerpt and contents list visit: http://www.enable-uk.co.uk/html/book_2.html