Recently I made an online purchase and was lead through numerous options for additional purchases. Although I wasn’t buying anthing web-related, I was offered the option to have this company submit my website to various search engines (see below). Cool, a freebie!
It’s just a tad misleading. It advertises that your website will get “spidered” by the search engines and submission will “boost your website’s ranking.”
ABOUT SPIDERS. Spiders are also known as “bots” or “robots”. They are programs that the search engines run and go from site to site, gathering the data that will be displayed when someone searches. They use the links between websites to make their way around the world wide web. These are hard-working little critters! They don’t just visit a site once, but visit all the millions of websites over and over again. It’s likely that even if you never submit your site to a search engine that the spiders will find still find your website.
RANKING. Submission, spiders, and ranking couldn’t possibly be further apart in how they effect the appearance of a site in the search engine results. Just as submitting a site doesn’t guarantee the visit of a spider, neither does submission or spiders determine how your website will be ranked by a search engine. Whether a site appears at the top of the first page of search results or the end of the last page depends more on the code and text in your website.
WHY MAKE THE OFFER? Submitting a site to Google is always free and doesn’t take any developed computer skills– just type in the domain address and what the site is about. There are other search engines that accept free submissions.
It appears that this offer is a loss leader, an entrance to more expensive “Search Engine Optimizing” services (SEO).
by Vanessa Wood
Design to Spec LLC – Website Design in Darien, CT
All content copyright ©2005-2009, Vanessa Wood
