I've been working on feeds (RSS & atom) lately, anticipating a flood of traffic whenever Windows Vista with it's built-in support for feed technology becomes popular. I'm still waiting for that, since even Microsoft seems to concede that Windows is once again the operating system so advanced you need a new computer to run it, focussing their marketing efforts on OEMs rather than the upgrade crowd.
Amidst the hoopla, I've neglected search engine submissions. All the major search engines claim that they'll find most web pages on their own, so it seemed more productive concentrate on creating new pages. Unfortunately, the major search engines' ability to find pages on their own seems to be rooted in geological time!
Just to illustrate, I did an Alexa search for "thewholeedcatalo" (my Amazon associates I.D.) Gack! 34 results. Not much of a showing for nine years online! Well, what exactly did Alexa find?
Number one, it found "tag" pages for my Squidoo "lenses". Not too surprising, given that a Google search for "Squidoo SPAM" yields ten times as many results as the number of "lenses" Squidoo claims. The rest of the results were about evenly divided between random "real" pages and dead links from spammy bush league "search engines," that are basically fronts for Google AdSense "content."
I did find one useful page. There, still chugging away after years of neglect, was my Alexa Toolbar Page, although there was no mention of the new Firefox Toolbar. I'd forgotten about it.
Alexa doesn't really spider the web, but relies mostly on input from -- I don't know -- perhaps dozens of Alexa Toolbar users. The toolbar communicates with Alexa about your web-browsing behavior, which has led many anti-spyware programs to incorrectly target it. The toolbar isn't spyware, since it operates with the user's permission -- but many potential users are scared spitless at the idea that their security is being "compromised."
So why use Alexa's toolbar, especially given that there are competing products out there that don't annoy your anti-spyware utilities? Honestly, unless your sense of civic duty compels you to contribute your two cents worth to the make-up of the web, there's no particularly good reason -- unless you're a webmaster / blogger.
While most search-engines jealously guard their databases, Alexa has taken a different approach. They make their data available to other search engines on a contract basis, as their robots.txt file indicates. Google's "Similar Pages" links are based on Alexa data, for example. (For more information see Search Engine Watch's Spider Spotting Chart.)
Because Alexa shares its data, it is a "one-stop shopping" solution for search engine submission. You can submit sites to Alexa via their secret "crawl site" form, but to submit larger numbers of pages, including traffic and linking data, the toolbar is a better choice.
The downside of the toolbar (there's always a downside) is that the chatting between your browser and Alexa.com consumes some bandwidth. Back in the days when I was using 56 Kbps dial-up, I found this performance "hit" to be prohibitive. On a broadband connection, it is barely noticable.
