Why NOT To Submit Your WordPress Blog To Search Engines

Once upon a time, HTML ruled the world, WordPress blogs were in their infancy and had not yet reached their current level of dominance.

Your website, written in html code, sat there fat, dumb and happy and nobody came to look at it including the search engine spiders – because nobody had told them that your site existed.

So you had to submit your site to the search engines who were themselves inundated with the task of reviewing and indexing thousands of sites.  So everything about getting your site indexed was long, slow and laborious.

In my last post I told you of the first reason you no longer have to worry about this.  Because your RSS feed plugged in to your personal pages hosted on the search engines is very quickly going to be found by the SE spiders which will rapidly scuttle down the feed, check you out and report back to mother that there's a new boy on the block.

The second reason is the Google XML Sitemaps plugin.  This creates a Google sitemap and holds it ready on your site for when the spiders come to call.  So every time you make a change on your site the sitemap is updated.

When you hit the Publish button your WordPress blog pings the Update Services who ping the search engines.  The search engine spiders come calling and are quietly presented with an up-to-date sitemap as they come through the door.

So, in effect, the process has been completely reversed from where it was some years ago.  Instead of having to create a sitemap from time to time and submit it to numerous search engines now the Google Sitemap plugin keeps it up-to-date automatically and the spiders collect it when they arrive.

And then the killer.  For some time those in the know have promoted the use of a single Update Service from Feedburner.com on the basis that multiple update services were only going to confuse the issue and potentially get you blacklisted.  And then Google came along, bought up Feedburner and turned it into a Google service.

So now with a single update service from Feedburner you are actually pinging Google direct to tell them about any new content you post.

Isn't technology wonderful?

Bruce Bird

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