"Why Aren't I on Search Engines?"
By Dawn Gray

Alright, I admit it.  I'm lazy.  I have relied on free submission tools to submit new websites to the search engines.  I go back after a couple weeks and resubmit by hand to the engines that haven't listed my website.

Well, I finally learned why most internet marketing "gurus" advise against that.  I was submitting th enew website I had designed for Saratoga Toastmasters club
(http://www.swiftfire.com/sites/saratoga) to search engines by hand, and I decided to submt my website as well.

When I tried submitting http://www.busymarketing.com , I discovered it couldn't be spidered!  A quick peek reassured me it was accessible by browser, so I emailed my host's technical support.

Technical support replied soon enough: they guessed it might be because of a Front Page support file, and told me removing it was the ONLY way to solve the problem. (of course, they didn't just *do* it.)

That seemed odd to me, but I told them to fix it.  A few days later, I still couldn't submit to the search engines.

Technical support was stumped.  They said they were looking at search engine help files for an answer!  Well, I could do that too.  I stopped by Lycos, and nothing seemed to fit, so I asked them about it.

Lycos would not tell me if it was possible to block their spider with a Front Page support file, but they did look at my robots.txt file.  They found out it was producing a Forbidden error.  (Search engine spiders look for a File Not Found error if no robots.txt file exists.  Any other error will confuse the spider.)

I'm sure there aren't many hosts out there with this problem.  Most understand the needs of their clients well enough to avoid problems with search engines, but with the proliferation of the Internet, there are more and more inexperienced hosts out there.  A few happy clients (who perhaps never check their search listings) and an advertising budget is all they need to convince even wary customers to sign on.

The moral of the story is:  submit your website to major search engines by hand, and check your listings frequently to be sure you remain listed.

Don't let your website's host swat away search engine spiders!  Your traffic depends on it.

Dawn Gray is the designer of Busy Marketing - Website Marketing
Tips for impatient beginners.  To subscribe, email
mailto:subscribe@busymarketing.com or visit our website at
http://www.busymarketing.com