David R wrote:
There are claims that sites manually submitted to Google reduces your pagerank by a few points because it didn't find your site by being linked to it.
This is actually a widely held belief that's been around for ages. I honestly don't know if it's true or if it's just another SEO meme. However it does sound credible. Basically the idea is that a site found naturally by Google in the process of it's regular crawl are worth more than one submitted by hand because they can easily be found on the web. This is exacerbated by the number of auto submission tools which spam the submission form, making submitted sites less valuable.
So can I hear it from the experts (ie: you guys) what the truth behind SEO really is. Are semantics worth anything?
There is a difference between SPAM and legitimate marketing. If you're selling "Grow it big" cream, you'll send out million of unsolicited emails in the hope that a few people will bite. It doesn't matter if your domain name gets blackholed or your server taken down after a week, because you'll just set up another one. However if your a legitimate company that wants to build it's brand and credibility in the market place, you're unlikely to resort to spamming.
The same is true of SEO. There will always be a market for spamdexing but if you're a legitimate company wanting to be around for a while, why take the risk? Rather than spamming, you want to build a long term SEO strategy that will deliver search engine results over a sustained period. To do this you want to create a site with great content that people want to link to.
Andy Budd
http://www.message.uk.com/
****************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/
See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help ******************************************************
