Paid Search Engine Listings Are Bull Puckey
Oh, you’ve seen the sites. “Just $49 and we’ll submit your site to a gazillion search engines! It’s great for SEO! It’s amazing! Give us your money!”
PFFFTTT!!!
This is just one of those bullshit services that newbies fall for.
Here’s the deal… DO NOT pay anyone for search engine listings. The robots will find you, even if you have no keywords in your title, even if you have a crappy description, even if you’ve only been online for a week. Robots will find your page and decide whether to rank it or whether to come back at all.
Want to see if the search bots have seen your page and when?
Just type your domain into the search engine and see what comes up. At Google, if you click in the “Cached” link under the description for your site, you can see your page and the date and time that Google last visited. If it was the current day or yesterday, cool! You’re updating often. If it was a month ago, you have problems, brothers and sisters. You need to add some fresh stuff to your site or you’ll never rank in the SERPs (search engine results pages) at all.
Bing also has a “Cached Page” link that you can check out, but they’re still slower than Google. Google had my page from yesterday, while Bing hadn’t been there since 11/5. You know how often I post, so…
Yahoo also has a “Cached” link, but it wasn’t working, so… I can’t comment on its frequency by using this technique.
But there is a foolproof way: You can also go into your hosting account’s c-Panel dashboard to check this out. Most have a feature called “AWStats,” which tells you quite a lot of information, including which search bots visited and how many times they came during the month and even how many times they successfully accessed your “robots.txt” file.
When I check there, I can see that all three major spider bots visited this blog today. You can see a lot of other cool stuff in AWStats, too, so be sure to check that out, but I’m seeing thousands of visits from search engine spiders and I didn’t do a think except post content regularly.
This is a total “rat hole” as we call it at OE:
One thing I often see newbies doing is taking the visitor stats on the front page of cPanel as a good number. But it’s not really… It’s a repeat visitor number and it includes search bots. When you boil that number down to unique visitors plus search bots, it will be far less that you might think.
Anyway, don’t give sites your good, hard-earned money to “get you into the search engines.” It’s just throwing money away.
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November 9th, 2009 at 8:33 pm #
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