We used to offer
low-cost, search engine submission
packages. However the nature of the Internet has
changed since then:
Here is why we do not offer
this service any longer:
When the Internet was young, not so long ago, there were
lots of search engines and the conventional wisdom was that
one of the first things that you needed to do was to submit
your site to all of those search engines. But what about today
when a handful of search engines dominate the scene; is search
engine submission still important or even necessary at all?
A short answer to both of these questions is a qualified “no.”
The major search engines such as Google, MSN, Yahoo and
Ask.com (Ask Jeeves) all employ robotic programs “bots” which
scour the Internet looking for data (sites) to add to the
search engine indices. Whenever they visit a web page they
look at the links on that page and follow them. If they follow
a link to a new site, that site is then included in their data
base. In addition, the bots periodically revisit all the sites
that they know about.
If you are curious or want to know how often the bots are
visiting your web pages, then look in your statistics
information (provided by many hosting firms) or look in your
site’s traffic logs. Yahoo’s bot is called Inktomi Slurp,
Google’s is Googlebot , MSN uses the MSNbot and Ask.com’s bot
is called Askjeeves .
Suppose you have just constructed a new site. How do you make
sure that it gets picked up by these “bots”? The best thing to
do is to find a site that is already included in the search
engines and get a link from that site to yours. Your web
designer or even hosting company may wish to link to you.
Perhaps one of your friends or colleagues has a website in
operation, ask them for a link. Perhaps you have an existing
site; then by all means link to your new site.
During the infancy of the Internet search engine submission
companies used to warn clients that they had better sign up
for a monthly submission program because search engines
sometimes “lost” sites or would not find your new material. In
the same way that a single submission to search engines is
hardly necessary, monthly submissions or submissions of
individual urls on a particular website are no longer
necessary.
Due to the revisiting patterns of the robots you don’t have to
worry about resubmitting your site. If you have some new pages
that you want to be included in the search engine, then just
make sure that you have easy to find text links to those new
pages. A site map page with text links to all of your pages is
the best way to ensure that the bots will follow and index all
of your pages.
It is rare that a site gets dropped from a search engine,
though it can happen if your site violates the terms of
service of the search engine, or is down for a prolonged time
due to server problems. If you are not sure whether your site
is in a particular search engine you can find out by making a
search: site: www.yoursite.com . If nothing turns up then your
site is not yet in that search engine, or if it had been in
that search engine, it is no longer there.
Similarly, if you are not sure how many of your pages have
been included in each search engine, make the search:
site:www.yoursite.com and the number of results will give you
an idea of how many pages are included in that particular
search engine.
Despite all that I have said, I have come across sites that
had been in existence for a while and still were not “found”
by the major search engines. In such cases the best thing to
do is to make a few manual submissions at these locations:
http://www.google.com/addurl
http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html (and click on the
Submit your site for free)
http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx
In the rare case where you suspect that your site may have
been dropped from a major search engine such as Google, due to
a violation of the search engine’s terms of service the best
thing to do is to fix what is wrong and make a re-inclusion
request. Google has a special url for this: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35843
So, in summary, don’t worry about search engine submission to
the main search sites, the busy bots are doing most of the
work.
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