Best Practices
At SearchDex™, ethics and integrity play a vital role in how we develop e-commerce marketing solutions. Our search solutions are developed and implemented using the highest standards of practice in the industry following all published guidelines and standards set by search engines. Additionally, membership in and cooperation with industry organizations such as the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) gives SearchDex a leading advantage by keeping SearchDex informed of industry trends.
There are many different ways to optimize visibility and relevancy within search engines’ organic results. A complex formula with many elements, visible and invisible to viewers, helps increase a site’s potential to appear at the top of organic search results. Focusing too much on one aspect of optimization can have negative effects on a site and can even cause a site to drop in the rankings. In addition, violating any of the search engine guidelines could lead to penalization by that search engine, up to and including being banned from the search engine results.
Since 1998, the SearchDex platform and approach to organic search visibility has evolved based on research, experience and client feedback. Additional research into the ever changing algorithms inside the search engines allows SearchDex to continuously implement new and improved compliant approaches. When the landscape changes, the SearchDex platform allows for a rapid automated upgrade.
As Search Marketing experts, SearchDex serves our clients with two clear goals:
- As a trusted advisor on industry compliance and ethical standards
- As an innovative leader in measured ROI on Internet marketing initiatives.
SearchDex maintains compliance with published industry guidelines while maximizing ROI, increasing relevancy, and boosting conversion for our client sites. Strict standards are in place to maximize client investment into our programs without engaging in techniques that may be counter-productive in the long term.
Making invisible pages visible
One of the fundamentals of SearchDex Best Practices is ensuring that the content a user is searching for is the same content a search engine indexes and subsequently ranks. SearchDex creates user friendly client-site pages that are indexable by the search engines, and are the same pages available to users that find them in the search engine results. SearchDex allows sites with dynamic and browser-adapted content to present that content to search engines with efficiency and fidelity:
- by allowing search engines to crawl site without session IDs or URL parameters.
- by supporting IMS headers through identified relevant database state changes.
- by preventing, limiting, or proxying sessions for site efficiency.
Creating systems that help avoid resource degradation during search engine content acquisition
Search engine activity on a site with dynamic URL’s with multiple variables can result in a client’s bandwidth being consumed by the vast number of possible combinations a robot may follow. SearchDex subscribers are protected from this annoyance, while SearchDex provides a client’s content to the search engine efficiently and completely.
Search Engine Compliance
A guiding principle in the development and implementation of the SearchDex Organic Search Platform involves following search engines’ published guidelines. SearchDex addresses the published guidelines of Google and Yahoo!, the two largest search engines, which collectively account for an average of over 75 percent of all search queries. Each guideline is followed by green text, which addresses the SearchDex features, development guidelines, and general principles that are employed to ensure compliance. Follow the links below to view SearchDex response to the SearchDex response to these guidelines.




