Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
services, placing advertised sites first or in highlighted areas. Others search
engines place the most commonly searched sites first, effectively isolating
newcomers by relegating them to the end of the list.
An organization needs to make sure that:
• Sites are identified to search engines.
• Public sites are accessible to the indexing services.
• Access logging and network bandwidth planning include overhead
for search engine access.
• Proper keywords are included in site meta tags to ensure visibility.
An organization should routinely review its placement in search engine
results and consider changing tags to meet evolving business functions
and to address changes in search order ranking.
Caching
Search engines frequently cache copies of indexed content, to ensure avail-
ability in case the indexed server is unavailable and to provide a reference
of when the site's content was last indexed. Visitors can examine content
from previous indexing operations, which can lead to difficulties if the
published content has been changed or purposefully removed. Accidental
release of sensitive information is a common issue for businesses without
formal policies to prevent customer data from being made available via
public websites. Once it is indexed, this information becomes very dif-
ficult to remove from future searches.
An enterprise should have data release mitigation plans in place that
include search engine cache redaction notification procedures, along with
the proper format and contact information for each major search engine.
Organizations should also include scheduled reviews of search engine con-
tent return following site updates. Some search engines can be prompted
to re-index a site to reflect new data, while larger organizational sites may
wish to use XML site mapping tools provided by the search engine ven-
dors to ensure that all desirable content is properly identified.
Bogus Information
Search poisoning is an all-too-common practice used to attract browsers
to unrelated sites, or to turn search results away from competitors' sites.
