by: Tony Dean
I have 'Googlebot' crawl my site every day like a dispossessed spirit that can't leave.
It was not always like this, I would go for a month or more before he came to my site and then would only crawl a few pages and leave again.
This has been going on now for two months or more, I've been watching the stats on my server everyday seeing just where he goes. He will crawl a few pages one day, and the next some other pages, and then finally leave until the morrow. After just three or four weeks, I noticed I got an infestation of lesser bots calling as well, some I have never heard of before, they seem to follow 'Googlebot' as though he is the Pied Piper of Hamelin.
What caused this infestation of bots?
Well, I got interested in rss feeds, I thought "What a good tool for drawing traffic to my site."
So I studied up on rss feeds until I understood what was involved. Now I am no 'techie', and the most programming I do is html in 'Notepad', making my own web pages.
Rss feeds use a similar language called xml, so it was easy to understand for me, and I was able to quickly make up an rss feed page in 'Notepad', placed it on my server, downloaded a 'feed reader' software, opened it up, placed the address of my feed in the 'feed reader', and up came my rss feed in the reader. It was so easy I wrote an ebook to tell everyone how to do it, it's called "Really Simple RSS".
There are many rss directories and syndication services that I submitted the address of my rss feed to, so other people can look at the feed in their 'feed reader' and see what articles I am posting.
Some of the 'subscribers' to the feed actually come and visit my site to see what it's all about, which happened almost straight away after I submitted my feed.
In less than 36 hours, 'Googlebot' found my feed!
In a little over two days later Yahoo's 'Slurp' bot found my feed, and from there on they have both been crawling my site with the lesser bots every single day.
They crawl everything, they crawl all my pdf ebooks, they look at a few pages in 'Webmasters Corner', they even look at my 'Bonus Reports', and even descend the staircase into my 'Secret Vault'!
When will they go home and stop prying into my little secrets?
I know I encourage them like leaving cheese for a mouse, by putting more pdf files, software and ebooks on my site every day, so I suppose the poor bots can't ever keep up!
I found out that like mice like cheese, that 'Googlebot' likes my pdf files, he has been fitted with digital spectacles so he is now able to actually read keyword rich pdf files all the way through to the end! So he likes pdf files.
So I have obliged him!
I put 85 pdf files up on my server one night just to keep him happily reading! I have put many more up on the server since, and will continue to create more pdf files of classic authors for free download, just to keep him calling with his 'friends'.
Isn't this a laugh?
It's like taking in a stray dog, feeding him, housing him, and the dog loosing the ability to wander off again and finding you have got a lodger for life.
My site's ranking has risen considerably both in Yahoo and Google, but for some reason that escapes me for the time being, my ranking rose more quickly in Yahoo and they rank it much higher than Google. I may well find the reason for this before long and put it in another article.
So if you are a web site owner struggling to get noticed by the web bots, don't put it off much longer, put up an rss feed with articles about your products or service and not only will 'Googlebot' call with his 'friends', but actual live people will call too.
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