Listen. Some make submitting pages to search engines sound like the fast track to search engine ranking nirvana. Not to mention you’ll see offers to submit your site to a scadzillion sites for some low nominal fee.Yeah right. It’s enough to make Pinocchio’s nose grow!
Because it’s just not true. Basically there are really only three search engines that count. Google snags more than 60% of all searches. Yahoo 23%. While MSN search has less than 10%. Which leaves a bit over 5% for the remaining scadzillions to fight over.
So don’t fall for the line those snake oil salesmen would have you believe. You know? That submitting to all known search engines will have the bots lining up like addicts at a methadone clinic to get at your site. With traffic following your high search engine rankings shortly thereafter.
Besides it’s not even necessary. Since if you have just one link from a site already in Google or Yahoo those bots will find you. Sooner or later. Making it safe to keep your wallet securely in your pants or purse.
Now I tell you all this knowing there may be one exception. But only for those who insist on submitting out of some sense of leaving no stone unturned.
If that’s you, do you know which one page might be the only possible exception to the “It Ain’t Necessary to Submit Your Site” rule?
Let me cue up the Final Jeopardy music while you ponder that.
Give up?
Okay, I’m talking about your site map. Reason being your site map points the bots to the promised land of all pages from your site. Or should.
Given that let me make this site map submission thing super quick and easy.
First to insure the bots can’t help but find yours, put a link to your site map in the footer of every page on your site. That’s right, EVERY page. This way no matter which page the bot lands on first it can’t miss your site map. And in turn follow it to all the pages of your site.
But wait. You gotta have a site map to submit a site map, right? Well then, here’s a nifty little site map generator that should be good enough to get you started.
http://www.netroglycerine.com/sitemap.html
It gets high marks from me because it works and it is available at no charge.
Here’s how it works.
Enter your URL. Click none of the check boxes. Then hit ENTER on your keyboard since there is no start or run key on the page. Then right before your very eyes, in seconds, one general issue site map will appear.
Next “View Source”. Cut and paste the code into your page template and away you go. One quick and dirty site map ready for submission. Or you can edit it a tad to clean it up a bit.
Oh and if you aren’t enamored with that approach here are some other suggestions. Both free and for fee.
Finally submit your site map page to Yahoo, Google and sooner or later MSN search once it’s unveiled. To help with that here’s the links:Yahoo http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request
Google http://www.google.com/addurl.html
Anyway, whether you use a tool to shave hours off the process or feel compelled to create your site map by hand, submitting a site map is a once and done deal. Do so and sooner or later a hapless search engine bot will be assigned to check out the page you submitted. When it does it will think it hit web pages paydirt and get busy indexing all pages in your site.
There. Now you know which page, if any, to submit where.
Copyright 2004 John Gergye
About The Author
John Gergye shares more ideas like this in his just updated eBook “Traffic From Google in 35 Days”. Find out more here: http://www.traffic-test-tube.com/j/tfg35cl.shtml. Or test your search engine IQ by taking his seo quiz http://www.traffic-test-tube.com/search-engine-quiz.shtml/ and get the free special report “Coming Out On Top”.
Written by SEO Tipster on July 28th, 2006 with no comments.
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I am sure the first thought provoking question that popped into your head would be: what exactly is PageRank? Well PageRank can be summed up as how vital Google considers a particular webpage. Pagerank is a value from 0-10, zero being the least significant and ten of which few obtain being the most note-worthy. PageRank is often abbreviated as PR and Google determines this PR bye evaluating how many websites link to yours, even though many of these links are missed.Who says Google gets to play the role of big brother? Google may be the leader that people praise and follow, yet why do webmasters allow themselves to be caught up in this publicity stunt? Sure it is a BASIC measurement of how much publicity a website is getting, but what is its real purpose?
As Pagerank gains ground webmasters loose sight of what they originally intended to accomplish. By writing this article I hope to give webmasters the foresight to distinguish that in the end PageRank won’t be what makes your website a success. Even though hard work and determination may help you achieve this success; skill, luck, and good timing play a bigger roll.
Many a-days I am sifting through my vast amount of spam mail and occasionally receive an email entitled “link exchange.” As I am always intrigued by possible link partners I typically read these emails.
When I come to an email that looks generic and has 100 mailers on the list I still give them a chance and then take a look at there website. Upon opening the website I am disgusted by the huge fonts and banners trying to sell me something, as a habit I look up at my toolbar and see that this website has a Pagerank of 6! What a possibility according to many website owners. The only opportunity I see in these types of links are purely PageRank building. On the other hand?
On a rare occurrence I come across an email titled “our partnership” as this email is already more intriguing I open it urgently and see a nice layout for this email that is directed towards me and my website. Anyways on with my point, I go to this website and see a terrific design plus they offer a unique service. According to habit and maybe a bit of my obsessive compulsive side I check the Pagerank. Humm, this website hasn’t even been indexed by Google yet? Should I exchange links with this website? I am sure most of you are thinking of course not, it would benefit my website in no way. On the contrary this website has the most potential to flourish and send you quality targeted unique’s!
What I am trying to prove is that because of this “higher power” aka Google PageRank people turn down websites that can provoke there own success! Why not put Google PageRank in a state of anarchy and let websites again be judged by there quality content and superior design!
Directly PageRank cannot be bought, though often I see links being sold at outrageous monthly costs on pages with a pr of 6 and up. Many times they will provide minimal traffic. Purchasing one of these links will not bring you any targeted traffic, or any traffic at all for that matter. A site wide link on a high pr website can and will boost your pr, but will it help promote and brand your website?
I am not trying to say boycott Google PageRank and start a protest, just merely use PR as a reference but not enough to influence you’re linking decisions and how much time you spend on link exchanges. I hope you walk away from reading this article with a more open mind towards linking with new websites. Understand that every website has potential there are just different degrees to this. You can’t earn a clients respect my running up to there door and desperately offering them your product, instead let them find you. Your approach to search engines shouldn’t be any different.
Concerned about the next PR update as attempting to get those last minute link partners up and running? Invest this time instead on building up quality content pages and the Google will find you!
Written by: Michael McLaughlin at http://www.webmastershed.com ? webmaster forum, for more articles by this author please visit: http://www.webmastershed.com/articles
Written by SEO Tipster on July 28th, 2006 with no comments.
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Black Hat SEO: Web Spamming and Linking to Bad NeighborhoodsSo you want to exchange links with other web sites in order to get higher search engine rankings?
So you want to create hundreds of auto-generated, keyword rich pages for your site?
Before you go and link to every website that is willing to exchange links, it would be a good idea to know where not to link to. Sometimes it can mean not linking to your own sites.
Firstly, lets take a look at the Google webmaster guidelines page which states:
“Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.”
I know that Google is not responsible for all search engine traffic, but it is a good guide to follow because other engines seem to be following along the same lines.
So what is a web spammer?
A web spammer is someone who creates hundreds or thousands of keyword rich pages in order to create the illusion of a themed site with related pages. These sites can be composed of sneaky redirect pages, doorway pages, gateway pages and now the latest craze seems to be auto generated directories. SEO circles call these types of pages “search engine clutter”.
The Professional Web Spammer
The aware, professional web spammer places the search engine clutter on a secondary domain and looks for link partners. If you exchange links with these webmasters, you will be at risk of getting a penalty if one of those sites gets banned.
These sites are created on disposable (secondary) domains and they all link or redirect to a main selling website which does not link back to the spam pages. Usually, all the secondary domains link to each other too.
This professional knows all about not using the standard web page templates that come with the auto directory generation software. This webmaster is clever enough to realize that common templates will be easy to detect by search engines which means that the web spam site will get banned very quickly. This webmaster will rebuild the pages from scratch which is usually a good way to avoid detection.
The Amateur Web Spammer
The amateur web spammer, hungry for high search engine rankings will purchase software which creates search engine clutter and make the mistake of not creating a disposable domain to serve these new pages and they will use the basic easily detected templates to generate the web site.
They upload these pages to their main site and link to them. The problem with this is that if a search engine perceives these auto-generated pages as spam, it will penalize, the site that links to them as well as remove the clutter from the index.
Sometimes these sites do not get detected straight away which means that they could have a decent amount of Page Rank, but is it worth taking that chance? Your biggest challenge will be to develop the ability to detect these types of pages with the naked eye.
One Linking Myth Exploded
Please understand that you will not receive a penalty if web spam or a bad neighborhood links to your site. It is the other way around. It is only if you link to web spam or a bad neighborhood that you risk getting penalized.
There is much misunderstanding regarding this issue. Look at it from a logical point of view. If this were true that you would get a penalty, all you would have to do to eliminate all your competition would be to create some web spam and link to your competitors. So it is plain to realize that you cannot get a penalty if web spam links to you. It’s the other way around.
So what is a bad neighborhood?
I do not know how exactly to define a bad neighborhood because a bad neighborhood is not a bad neighborhood until it gets defined as such by a search engine. Examples include Free For All Links pages (FFA s), Link Farms and useless directories designed to do nothing more than create the illusion of a themed web site.
A good guide to follow would be not to link to any site which does not contain useful information or relevant content. More info about bad neighborhoods here: http://www.v7n.com/forums/showthread.php?t=11376
The Obsessive Compulsive SEO practitioner
The obsessive compulsive SEO practitioner will go to any length to get top search engine rankings quickly. It is sort of like gold fever. The bug bites and it becomes difficult to let go of the insanity.
This webmaster is always looking for the easier softer way. The delusion is strong. The insanity has got a grip of the obsessive compulsive SEO. In the end, when they get sick and tired of getting banned, they swear off Internet Marketing altogether claiming that everybody in the industry is a rip off artist.
The problem is that they got exposed to rubbish before they discovered the good stuff. They have been permission marketed by someone they trusted and ended up wasting a lot of time. (and I do mean a lot of time)
Why not create a legitimate web directory?
Here is some good stuff. In the long run, it seems to me to be a lot easier to go to a script archive like hotscripts.com or scriptsearch.com and search for terms like “toplist”, “directory” “community” and “portal”. These single one word search terms will produce many results which contain scripts which will do a much better job of creating a directory than the latest auto-directory generation software sold by Internet marketers who own big mailing lists of newbies.
Many of these scripts are free and there is some really excellent ones you can buy. The point here is that you can create a useful web site with these scripts which you will be proud to link to.
Copyright 2004 Ed Zivkovic
About The Author
The author, Ed Zivkovic owns his own website which contains articles, tips, tricks, free downloads and more. Here is the site: http://www.ezau.com.
Written by SEO Tipster on July 28th, 2006 with no comments.
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