Back in 2005, the braintrust at Godaddy decided to save on bandwidth by blocking Google’s spiders from their servers.
Of course, the result was that thousands of websites hosted with Godaddy were dropped from Google’s index, and web site owners money by the truckload. On a positive note, although the website owners did lose money, Godaddy saved money by not having to serve pages to Googlebot and thereby saving bandwidth.
Godaddy did this without telling any of their customers, but the story broke when Google announced that Godaddy was blocking Googlebot. (Damn, if only Google would have kept their big mouths shut!)
The result was an exodus of customers from Godaddy and Godaddy admitting to their unethical ways and pledging to work with Google to fix the issue.
Skip forward a couple years to the present day.
Again they appear to be unresponsive to Google’s spider.
Playing it on the cheap led me down the wrong path when I selected a web directory to use. I’m not going to mention exactly who I was with out of politeness, but the main thing that wasted my valuable time was renting space instead of just buying it outright. Recently I’ve straighted things out by plonking down less than fifty bucks to sign up with Web Directory 7.
With so many websites fighting over the same turf you really need someone solid at your side to help you navigate through the mess. V7 has really got its act together in organizing their directory. It took me about three months to get out of the routine of renting web directory space and switching over to purchasing a stable spot with Web Directory 7, but now that I’ve done so I can’t recommend it enough.
There’s obvious increased traffic on my blogs since I’ve gone over to using the new directory. V7 appears to have an inside scoop on how to chart new waters in the rocky seas of the SEO biz and I feel confident in counting on them to up my unique visitors this coming year.
Hat tip to John Scott