webmasters guide...

Getting your site listed on any search engine can be tricky. You have to consider search engines while designing and developing your website. Below we have outlined some ways you can make sure your site will be included in our index and achieves well in the search results.

firstly, what not to do...

The biggest rule we ask, is don't make search engine spam. Its not big and it's certainly not clever. We have systems in place to alert us to potential spam sites and all it takes is a single click and your site is put on a black list, this can also affect other websites which are interlinked with your own. Note: when we say search engine spam we mean every form of it, no dynamic pages of useless content and no pages with gross amounts of keywords in - it doesn't help.

Don't use duplicate content, republishing the same article around your site will only work against you, we remove all pages deemed to be duplicates and mark the whole domain down for publishing in this fashion. Also websites which share content is discriminated by our crawler too, its just wasting someones time if they search for something and the top 10 results are all the same article only posted on different domains.

FAQ: "my website isn't even listed on onescene.com ?"

As onescene.com is a Gay & Lesbian search engine your site must achieve well on our "gay-o-meter" before our crawler will start indexing it. The chances are at some point we have tested your site to see if it qualifies for our index, if your site isn't listed in our results pages, there could be a couple of reasons why:

1. your site didn't achieve well on the 'gay-o-meter'
2. your site has been accepted, its just waiting its turn to be crawled
3. your site has been accepted, crawled, its just waiting to be indexed
4. your site has been accepted, crawled, indexed and waiting for our cache to reset

As long as your site didn't achieve poorly on the gay-o-meter, it will be listed on onescene.com at some point in the future. Our search engine is very complex and there are various layers to it, we suggest you read our information on how our search engine works before reading on. Each layer (testing, crawling, indexing, caching) can take weeks to move through. Some sites have what we call 'priority crawling', which means they are zoomed through the 4 layer process in hours rather than weeks, these websites have been manually chosen as they provide 'current affairs' such as news.

FAQ: "I think my site scored low no the 'gay-o-meter' ?"

Update it, make sure you follow the guide lines for site optimization below. Include a decent description in the META tags, give it some keywords. Make sure the page has a title, and don't stick a silly flash movie on the front page - have some content which our search engine can read and analyze!

FAQ: "Not all of my pages are listed ?"

If you pages are identified by using variables in the URL string (ie: example.com?page=intro) then our site won't look at them. We use to index variable url's but some sites flooded are index with useless information, so we decided just to accept absolute files (ie: example.com/intro.php).

If that hasn't answered your question then all we can say is be patient, as long as your pages are linked to by other pages in our index, we will get there eventually! We have a huge amount of webpages listed in our index which are waiting to be indexed and even more waiting to be crawled - we will get to everyone sooner or later!

FAQ: "I want my articles to have page specific thumbnails!"

If the articles have JPG thumbnails linking to them we will pick the thumbnails up at some point. If you want to make it a bit quicker we suggest adding a new tag to your META data:

<meta name="thumbnail" content="http://yoursite.com/thumbanil.jpg">

This is a META tag we created to allow our search engine to quickly scoop up article's thumbnail images without having to think too hard. replace the URL with your own thumbnail image and place it with the rest of the META tags at the top of your html file.

Have a question we haven't covered here?

Send us a message and we will get back to you as soon as we can!