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The Resubmission Myth by: Bobby Heard So the thinking goes, the more times you resubmit your site to the search engines, the better chance that you have of getting to the top for your keywords. I can't tell you how much it aggravates me when I hear about another searach engine optimization company who is selling resubmission packages to struggling small-business owners who just want to find one 'professional'¯ in this industry who isn't charging them ridiculous prices for NO results. Unfortunately, not only do their clients not understand that they are totally wasting their money and not improving their site's rankings at all, they are actually paying a company to potentially crush their rankings. The search engines are a touchy group. As you can imagine, they get hassled constantly, as they hold the key to most business' success. They have systems in place to handle the incredible amount of information that they must organize and database. The submission process is simply one of those systems they have, used to inform them of your web site's presence if they were previously unaware of its existence. That's all that it is. Once they are aware of the URL of your web site, they will continue to go to it, update it, and most importantly, keep it in their database. So what's the harm in resubmission you ask? Well, it's like sitting in class when your teacher is taking attendance. She calls out your name and you say that you are present. Then, EVERY 5 minutes for the rest of the day, you put up your hand and remind her that you are still present. This may sound ridiculously stupid, but in essence, that is what you are doing to the search engines when you resubmit to them, and search engines can sometimes react by throwing your listing out of their database, just like your teacher is likely to react by throwing you out of her class. By continually submitting your site, you are creating more work for a major company that is trying (as every company surely is) to create a cost-efficient operation. Your continual submission means that they have more information to process and thus, more money to spend employing someone to deal with that information. The search engines, just like all of us and any successful business, hate wasting money where they don't need to. So if you continually resubmit your site, they get progressively irritated, and will sometimes take drastic measures such as banning your site from their database. These search engine optimization companies that tell their consumers that resubmissions work also present other ridiculous claims: 'We will submit you to 1000's of search engines'¯ - This list always ends up including Google, Google Canada, Google Germany and Google for every country they have a site for as well as Yahoo, Yahoo Canada, Yahoo Australia, etc. The problem here is that every Google site uses the same Google database and every Yahoo sites uses the same Yahoo database. Don't believe me? Go to google.com and look at the very bottom of the page beside their copyright. It says searching 8 billion + pages. Now go to google.de, google.ca, google.com.au, google.co.uk and look in the same place, do you notice something? It's the same number! It's the same database! 'Search Engines only index the pages that you submit to them'¯ - What they're saying here is that any other pages of your site won't be indexed unless you submit each of them individually. Wrong again! Don't believe me? Go to yahoo.com and type in 'www.abalone.ca'¯ We only submitted our index page when we first started our business. Just one page (index.html), once. Look how many pages they have put in their database. About The Author BObby Heard is a Web Strategist at Abalone Designs. www.abalone.ca offers free resources and anlysis for business owners. bheard@abalone.ca This article was posted on December '08
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