Is Excite ignoring subdirectory page submissions?

During this past month we've heard rumors that Excite is only accepting upper level domain (root domain) submissions for indexing. We now have an official confirmation that this is indeed true.

Excite not only mentions this on their "How to Get Listed" page -- http://www.excite.com/Info/listing.html, they recently sent out the following email to one of our subscribers...

Thank you for your interest in Excite. If you are trying to submit your site for inclusion in the Excite index of websites please only submit the top-level domain name, otherwise know as the root domain. That would be for example: www.yoursite.com

Unfortunately we will not accept subdirectory pages through the submission process. At this point we are trying to keep our index to a minimum so we can test new systems and searching techniques. If you submit your site and it meets our guidelines (please see: http://www.excite.com/Info/listing.html) then it should get indexed in approximately two to three weeks. At that point there is a possibility that another of our spiders may come across your site and index subsequent pages, but there is no guarantee of that.

If you would like to submit your site please go to our Add URL link on the Excite home page. On the following link please be sure to type in the full URL for your site (i.e. http://www.yoursite.com/). If you have any other questions please let me know. Thank you again for your interest in Excite!

Mike Gardner
Technical Support Engineer
Excite, Inc.

Frankly, we are not surprised. In fact, we expect that other search engines may even follow this pattern in one form or another. So what can you do?

First, make sure that your website starts from your own upper level domain. The days when sub-domains receive equal treatment with upper level domains are coming to an quick end.

Second