How to get a spider to index your WHOLE site
 by John Heard

New SE Strategy -- Hidden Links
Book reference -- Trick #15

This month we've added to the book a new strategy that closely resembles "Trick #10" -- The secret of the "Phantom Pixel". The sole purpose of this new strategy is to assist you in getting more of your pages indexed into certain "difficult" search engines such as Excite and AltaVista. As you are probably aware, some search engines limit the number of pages you can directly submit through their "add url" feature; or, they limit how many pages you can submit per day.

In order to help explain how the "Hidden Links" technique can work to your advantage, we must first discuss how a search engine spider "crawls" or travels through the web.

When a search engine spider is out "crawling" the web, it will often start with pages within it's own index and check to see if there have been any updates made to those pages. When the engine's spider visits a page and it discovers new links, the spider will also attempt to index those newly linked url's and add them to the engine. To make this work to your advantage, it is a good idea to put links to ALL pages you want indexed on EVERY page of your site. That way, no matter how the spider finds your site, it's only one link away from all of your other pages.

If you have a large site, the first thing you might say is "I don't want to fill all my pages with links!". That makes sense... and that's where the "hidden pixel -- trick#10" comes into play. By using small "hidden pixels" on your pages you can add many links without affecting the look of your web pages -- and still reap the benefits of getting more pages indexed.

Here is an example on how to put in several hidden links:

<a href="http://www.server.com/pagetoindex.html"><img src="pixel.gif" height="1" width="1" border="0"></a>

<a href="http://www.server.com/pagetoindex.html"><img src="pixel.gif" height="1" width="1" border="0"></a>

<a href="http://www.server.com/pagetoindex.html"><img src="pixel.gif" height="1" width="1" border="0"></a>

<a href="http://www.server.com/pagetoindex.html"...

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