Difference between Search Engines and Web Directories

April 20, 2008

Search Engines:

Search engine spiders or crawls through the internet in search of necessary information. It uses sophisticated program for crawling through various pages that it meets up. After proper analysis of the every single word in all of the pages, they are stored. With the help of an algorithm search engine determines the relevance of the topic when a searcher searches for information. The search engine searches in its databases, and then gives a list of documents, which have relevant words used by the searcher. Search engines list the WebPages only.

Important aspects that help in getting higher ranking for websites in search engines are title, mega tags, and text. If there is an addition of sentence to the website, there will be after effect in ‘search engine ranking’ while re-indexing takes place. Updation of index of most of the search engines is monthly or bi-monthly. Web masters can submit web pages to the search engines as well.

Those algorithms determine search engines use of certain algorithms to choose the first webpage to show amongst the numerous web pages. There is more importance to the page title in search engines and there is greater weightage for that. For getting the webpage noticeable in the search engine and to getter higher ranks, its vital to have well written content and it should contain target keyword in good frequency.

Web Directories:

Human editors than robots, unlike the search engines, carry out compilation of directories. Web directory is more of like phone book, which is there in the web in a complex form. Most of the web directories are human edited, and the addition of links of website to it is dependent on the review of the editors. They do the categorization of the links as well. For organization of the database, directories have a tree structure rooted to some hierarchy. Web directories list the links of the whole website. There are main categories as well as sub categories in web directories.

Only legitimate companies’ website links gets added the web directories, ensuring the non-presence of spams. There is submission fee for addition of links in many web directories. Inclusion of the website links are based on criteria like relevance of the link relative to the categories in directory, accuracy, scope, audience, as well as coverage. Free web directories, paid web directories are the main two types of web directories. Then there are bidding based web directories, link exchange based web directories as well as hybrid web directories. There are specialized web directories, for example, web hosting web directories, web design directories, business web directories so on.

The changes made on the websites will not affect their rankings in web directory, except when there is drastic change. Web directories are useful while looking for available content based on the required topic, and due to good organizational structure directories can save time for research. Web directories can help in increasing the website traffic much better than search engines if you go for paid submissions, or bidding based submissions.

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