Re: Search Engine Submission

From: Robert J. Woodhead <trebor_at_animeigo.com>
Date: Tue 16 Nov 1999 07:36:35 -0500

ROBERT WOODHEAD WROTE:
> OK, the short answer. Submit your main url and all your
> important sub-urls to the Search Engines (ie: Altavista,
> Hotbot) once a month.

ROD ARIES REPLIED:
> Do NOT, NOT, NOT set up your pages to be automatically
> submitted to the engines on some interval. It can be
> the kiss of death for your rankings.

With all due respect to Rod, I must disagree. If you
have a good ranking with a search engine and they
change their underlying algorithm, your ranking
immediately changes. A page does not have a static
ranking; the ranking is based on the query. Submitting
the same page with the same html more than once will
not change your ranking unless the search engine
discriminates against new pages.

A little thought will show you that no well-done search
engine would do this; most importantly, such a system
would favor "stale" pages, and would result in more of
the top-ranking links pointing to either old
information or bad links. For this reason, if they're
going to discriminate based on when the page is
submitted or spidered, they ought to do it in favor of
the new page. Note that as far as I know, no search
engine does this, probably because if they did,
everyone would submit once a day!

The reason for submitting every month "whether they
need it or not" is that (1) sometimes urls don't get
added, and (2) sometimes they get dropped (as with
what happened with Altavista last month). Given that
most of the majors (with the exception of Altavista)
are taking months to add listings, if you have several
requests "in the queue" at any one time, if your
listing drops out, you're likely to get back in
quicker. Furthermore, if you change your pages,
because there are undone requests in their queues, the
change is reflected faster. And even if the search
engines are combining multiple requests, you'll have
at least one in the queue.

I would conclude by pointing out that you'll get more
bang for your buck concentrating on proper keyphrase
selection and search-engine friendly page design, than
obsessing over how often to submit to the search
engines. In this, Rod and I am in total agreement. In
fact, I'd be interested in his opinion of my tutorial
on the matter -- http://selfpromotion.com/pageprep.t

If you are sufficiently wedded to the search engines
that these fine points matter, you'll probably say
"Who cares if Rod or Robert is right, I'll do both!"
and submit your main pages every month, and a ton of
doorway pages just once. But for most people, this
isn't worth the time investment.

Concerning the major indexes and submitting manually,
Rod writes:

> Well, yes, this is true. But the ranking is not in
> the 'technical' aspect of submission, the ranking
> is in the 'art' of how you submit -- that is what
> separates how your site will perform in the search
> directories.

Exactly. That's why I have a page on my site devoted
to the subtler techniques of submitting to places like
Yahoo and Open Directory. A good listing there is
worth more than a good ranking at a search engine, and
much easier to get!

http://selfpromotion.com/yahootips.t

Best,R





Received on Tue Nov 16 1999 - 06:36:35 CST