The thumbnails in directories

I noticed that a lot of directories use thumbnails of your frontpage next to the listing. I also noticed that almost all of the thumbnails are of my old site design. Even the new ones I submitted to. Do the directory owners use google's cashe for the thumbnail or am I simply missing something?

 

No they use third party services like alexa(no longer free etc). So they display whatever image the third party provider is serving.

 

Oh... that makes sense... so when the third party updates does it auto update in the directory?

 

Yes, since the images are practically hotlinked, they are not stored on the directory's server.

 

Cool, thank you

 

u can use

http://msnsearch.srv.girafa.com/srv/i?s=MSNSEARCH&r=http://www.digitalpoint.com

and replace digitalpoint.com with the domain

 

My site wasn't showing up at all, I found this post by Rob which has this link
http://www.girafa.com/updateurl.acr to request an update. That is if you are using the MSN/girafa way.

 

You could also take a closer look at: http://websnapr.com/ and http://www.thumbshots.org/.. both offering screenshots for your websites/directories.

 

go to alexa and change it ask for an updated thumbnail...i do it for all new sites entering my directory takes all of 2 minutes and they usally have it updated within 48 hours.

thx
malcolm

 

The MSN picsare superfast in comparison to Alexa. As soon as they stopped being free I think they killed any use of their pics.

I think MSN updates once a month or so.

 

well alexa doesnt cost me a cent and they still get it done within 48 hours.

thx
malcolm

 

I'll see how alexa works out...

 

MSN is best.It's best and it's also fast.Alexa is not free moreover it's slow!
Saad

 

msn has got my old site design indexed :S lets hope it index the new one
Thanks for the link on how to add a thumbnail, I was looking for this to add it to my directory

 

except your are using MSN thumbs, not Alexa, silly man.

el oh el.

 

I've been thinking of implementing something like this on my site - although the images are not necessarily thumbs of the sites just something related!

I was going to ask how does a directory ensure the images are proper! But I just realised that the thumbs are auto generated for a site..silly me. That is quite cool...that's got me thinking...

 

how often they will update your thumbnail will depend on how often you update your site. I see large content sites have their thumbnail updated pretty often.

 

Hmm.. I never knew that. Thanks for sharing. I had this site that always had thumbnails of the old look. It was nice to know that they still change.