Ten years ago all the search engines used to propose an option tu submit a website. At this time the robots that scanned the web were not as efficient as today. Submitting your website was the best method to get it referenced.
A team (often the founders of the search engine!) worked night and day with their little hands to check the quality of the submitted sites and sorted them in topics. It is the principle of a portal like Yahoo! for example.
Later, the portals begun to implement computerized routines (a “crawler” or “spider”) to bring some automation in the processes dedicated to the indexing of websites (Altavista, Google and all the others). Thanks to this innovation and the upcoming of “search engines” technologies there was no need for the site owners and webmasters to submit their sites into the search tool. The “bot” would find the website automatically and record it in its data base to make it searchable by the users. Thus, you need to be sure that your site is optimized. To ensure this you can appeal to SEO (Search Engine Optimization) specialists.
During many years - in the early 2000’s - it was common to find both systems manual submission and automated crawling coexisting in a search engine.
At that time websites were mostly static. Once the submitted link referenced, the updates were visible only after the search engine crawler achieved its round trip to explore the entire websphere. The duration of this process of crawling the web was varying: usually from several weeks to a couple of months!
But here we are! Internet including the recent phenomenom of blogs and syndicated websites is facing a dramatic inflation. It becomes more and more difficult for a site to be visible in a search engine. To be (to stay) visible it is now necessary to promote the site via a set of online advertising techniques: banners, sponsored links, buzz (see our recent post), etc.
In view of the quantity of information the search engines have now to process they adopted more efficient indexing strategies based on several criteria. Some systems favour website according to their popularity (number of links that point to a given site), other emphasize the activity level (frequency of the updates) and the last focus on the relevance (the way a link matches best with the keywords typed in by the users). Most of the time a search engine will tune all these criteria through what is called an “algorithm”.
So the websphere forms two layers. The top layer of a results page consists of popular, frequently updated and relevant sites. The bottom layer consists of all the other. Let’s notice that one can also find in the top results the sites that have adopted a sponsored links program as well as sites considered as “influential”. It’s not far from the idea of web sedimentation like in geology.
Other innovations were introduced few years ago. In particular, the RSS and Atom syndication enabling search engines and feeds aggregators to be immediately notified of the updates (principle of pinging).
However, the tendency of proposing a “Submit your site” module on a search engine is declining. At Blogdimension.com we decided to keep this key function. We explain why below.
How does it work on Blogdimension.com?
As a reminder, Blogdimension.com deals only with dynamic or syndicated sites (blogs, microblogs, news feeds, forums and images, podcasts and online videos).
As to the ranking of the results we give preference to the date or “recency” (some call it “freshness”) of a link. The more a site is uptodate the more it is positionned on the top of a results page. It’s our choice! And also difference! So we avoid the kind of sedimentation we mentionned above. It also limits the development of “star systems” among the bloggers and other castes or clusters. Every blogger can be on the top list at Blogdimension.com provided he or she is prolific! We believe it’s more fair this way.
Nevertheless, the users have the possibility to sort the results also by relevance and a mix of relevance+date. We will soon propose additional options based on popularity. So the users will have a vast choice for filtering the results.
Blogdimension.com proposes a “Submit a blog” function… What’s the benefit?
Albeit its “bot” scans the Internet to send home new blogs and updates automatically, Blogdimension.com offers the possibility to submit a site manually.
It is particularly useful for new sites. It enables them to be indexed before the crawler has achieved its tour of the blogosphere. Every submitted site is generally indexed the day after and becomes “searchable” by Blogdimension.com’s users. The engine then follows every link encountered in the posts of the submitted site or blog to make up an ever growing index.
It is of your interest to submit your blog in Blogdimension.com!
1) to be sure to be referenced in Blogdimension.com,
2) to be ahead of time regarding the next tour of the robot.
NB: we unleash our robot only on given areas of the Internet (the blogosphere and syndicated sites). We do not scan the overall web. We focus only on the web that moves, the Web 2.0 and multimedia one!
Thanks for your support,
The Team
