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I was wondering if I can submit pages that link to my site directly to search engines, or if there is a penalty for doing so.
I do it all the time - no problems yet.
Can I submit the page containing the article? Or is this taboo because it's technically not my site...
I often see that website owners presents news or articles about their businness on a special page of the website. Maybe it solve your ethical ;) problem if you do somewhat comparable and put backlinks to those sites, which containing the links to your site. The spiders will crawl the page, follow (hopefully) the links and index the pages.
Greetings NN
1. I have my own program for search engine submissions.
2. I have certain places I want to be listed, and other places I DON'T want to be listed.
3. I don't want to have a black mark against my name for spamming by overly frequent submission because you and every second other visitor to my site decides to 'do me a favor'.
To make a long answer short, no, don't do it.
Hope it helps
1. I have my own program for search engine submissions.
Iīm afraid you have to live with other people submitting your pages. Itīs like somebody told the newpaper that you live in a wonderful house with a huge garden that you opened up for the public to enjoy and that they should go check it out. If they do and write an article on it there is nothing you can do as long as the press stays within the limits you set when opening your property to the public.
And even if I donīt submit but choose the links page approach there is little you can do, as this falls within the fair use clauses of most copyright legislation. (I admit there are exceptions.)
2. I have certain places I want to be listed, and other places I DON'T want to be listed.
Not submitting is not the way to control where you want to be listed and where not. Use the robots exclusion standard, access blocking based on user agent or ip address, meta elements for that.
3. I don't want to have a black mark against my name for spamming by overly frequent submission because you and every second other visitor to my site decides to 'do me a favor'.
That is why search engines donīt punish for frequent submission. GG said that time and again. DMOZ stores the ip address of the person submitting a link. If your page is submitted frequently and you get punished you have a good standing showing that those were not your ip addresses.
Andreas
By and large I'm quite comfortable with not being able to do anything about other people's actions with my material. But if asked if I like it or not, I certainly will take the opportunity to say. :)
Not submitting is not the way to control where you want to be listed and where not. Use the robots exclusion standard, access blocking based on user agent or ip address, meta elements for that.
Agreed, and I do use all these measures in various situations. Again though, I'd rather have first choice of where to list, rather than having to shut the barn door after the horse has bolted.
Example: a couple of the sites I work with are professional technical sites. They are listed in a minimal number of places because they are the only places they need to be listed. I ran into a wrangle recently where site members were being 'bothered' by frequent emails from students asking for project material, work, etc. Membership not pleased. Tracked the problem back to the fact that the site (despite meta and robots tags, etc), had been listed on a couple of heavily student-oriented directories. Took a ridiculous amount of time to get it removed. The directories did not spider and were run from student submissions.
Yes, it's probably a rarer situation that a site doesn't want to be listed in as many places as possible, but it happens.
That is why search engines donīt punish for frequent submission. GG said that time and again. DMOZ stores the ip address of the person submitting a link. If your page is submitted frequently and you get punished you have a good standing showing that those were not your ip addresses.
The majors don't worry me too much in that instance, but there are some very important minors out there for my fields that have few or no such security measures in place.
Horses for courses.
I have absolutely no problem with any webmaster placing a link to any site of mine on their own pages. If the site is under their control and there is any problem with the link, at least I can contact them and deal with the situation.
When a third party is involved it can get a bit more fiddly.
