I am trying out a different strategy for my newest website. This time, I am not submitting to SE's, but rather I'm submitting to a ton of directories, creating newsfeeds, and posting articles to get crawled and indexed. That being said, would creating and submitting a sitemap.xml to GG and sitemap.txt to yahoo feeds be, essentially, a submission to these search engines, or would it be a "back door" to inviting them to crawl my site (without being an actual site submission). Sorry for what I am sure is a newbie question. I want to avoid submitting directly to either google or yahoo, preferring instead to get their spiders to crawl and index afterwards. Thanks. Paul
Yes its for crawling, not submission. You don't need to submit to search engines remember, they come to you (the important ones anyway). There is definitely no need to bother submitting to google and yahoo.. I have found sitemap tools to be very useful, with the google spider visiting on a daily basis after I add the sitemap.xml.
I would say you are spot on. Do not submit to any search engines directly, but do submit xml sitemaps using your google account. Sounds like a contradition, but I have had some VERY positive experiences from using sitemaps.
It appears that I have been indexed by google, far faster than when I submitted to Google directly. However, if you type "www.village-drugstore.com" in yahoo, what comes up is some weird site - "Geomag," which appears to be - god knows what. Can anyone tell me what this is all about? If you look at the page description, in the search results, you can see villagedrugstore.com...is this just a confusion with my site (having dashes between the words of the domain), and does it pose some concern for the future? Thanks...