hen the Internet was
young, not so long ago, If you are curious or want to
there were lots of search know how often the bots are
engines and the conventional visiting your web pages, then
wisdom was that one of the first look in your statistics
things that you needed to do was information (provided by many
to submit your site to all of hosting firms) or look in your
those search engines. But what site’s traffic logs. Yahoo’s bot
about today when a handful of is called Inktomi Slurp, Google’s
search engines dominate the is Googlebot , MSN uses the
scene; is search engine MSNbot and Ask.com’s bot is
submission still important or called Askjeeves .
even necessary at all?
Suppose you have just constructed
A short answer to both of these a new site. How do you make sure
questions is a qualified “no.” that it gets picked up by these
The major search engines such as “bots”? The best thing to do is
Google, MSN, Yahoo and Ask.com to find a site that is already
(Ask Jeeves) all employ robotic included in the search engines
programs “bots” which scour the and get a link from that site to
Internet looking for data (sites) yours. Your web designer or even
to add to the search engine hosting company may wish to link
indices. Whenever they visit a to you. Perhaps one of your
web page they look at the links friends or colleagues has a
on that page and follow them. If website in operation, ask them
they follow a link to a new site, for a link. Perhaps you have an
that site is then included in existing site; then by all means
their data base. In addition, the link to your new site.
bots periodically revisit all the
sites that they know about. During the infancy of the
Internet search engine submission though it can happen if your site
companies used to warn clients violates the terms of service of
that they had better sign up for the search engine, or is down for
a monthly submission program a prolonged time due to server
because search engines sometimes problems. If you are not sure
“lost” sites or would not find whether your site is in a
your new material. In the same particular search engine you can
way that a single submission to find out by making a search:
search engines is hardly site: www.yoursite.com . If
necessary, monthly submissions or nothing turns up then your site
submissions of individual urls on is not yet in that search engine,
a particular website are no or if it had been in that search
longer necessary. engine, it is no longer there.
Due to the revisiting patterns of Similarly, if you are not sure
the robots you don’t have to how many of your pages have been
worry about resubmitting your included in each search engine,
site. If you have some new pages make the search:
that you want to be included in site:www.yoursite.com and the
the search engine, then just make number of results will give you
sure that you have easy to find an idea of how many pages are
text links to those new pages. A included in that particular
site map page with text links to search engine.
all of your pages is the best way
to ensure that the bots will Despite all that I have said, I
follow and index all of your have come across sites that had
pages. been in existence for a while and
still were not “found” by the
It is rare that a site gets major search engines. In such
dropped from a search engine, cases the best thing to do is to
make a few manual submissions at been dropped from a major search
these locations: engine such as Google, due to a
violation of the search engine’s
size="-2">http://www.google.com/a to do is to fix what is wrong and
ddurl make a re-inclusion request.
size="-2">http://search.yahoo.com this:
/info/submit.html (and click on http://www.google.com/support/web
the Submit your site for masters/bin/answer.py?answer=3584
free) 3
size="-2">http://search.msn.com/d So, in summary, don’t worry about
ocs/submit.aspx search engine submission to the
main search sites, the busy bots
In the rare case where you are doing most of the work.
suspect that your site may have
About the Author:
Donald Nelson is a web developer, editor and social worker. He has been working on the Internet since 1995, and is currently the director of A1-Optimization http://www.a1-optimization.com, a firm providing low cost search engine optimization, website copywriting and article writing services.
Read more articles by:
Donald Nelson
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