robots txt to prevent crawling of freesites

[Carrie]

It's gotten to the point where the "SE benefits" (incoming links, quicker spider access coming to your sites) far outweigh the traffic benefits when submitting to LLs. Most of the submitters I know *only* do it now for SE purposes, any sale the site might possibly make is just a bonus.

Used to be you could submit a freesite and make 3 sales the first week. Now you're lucky if you make 3 sales in the 6 months that it's up (and then some LL owners rip it down). The traffic ain't what it used to be... hence the LL owners trading with TGPs, increasing required number of pictures, making pictures bigger, etc.

If you take away the SE benefits then there really isn't much reason left to submit anymore, unless you like working your ass off for the possibility of an odd once-in-a-blue-moon signup. The time would be better spent doing other things.

[DJilla]

Originally Posted by Carrie

It's gotten to the point where the "SE benefits" (incoming links, quicker spider access coming to your sites) far outweigh the traffic benefits when submitting to LLs. Most of the submitters I know *only* do it now for SE purposes, any sale the site might possibly make is just a bonus.

That's an interesting take and I certainly felt the same way about the SE benefits when I got into it. I'm not sure if your referring specifically to just getting your site "spidered" more often in which case, ya you are probably right. But for PR benefit and getting specifc FS listed I think the marketplace has shown that both are pretty low liklihoods. Hence maybe the move towards submitting to LL's you know are high in traffic or aren't going to disappear next month (like mine). But, I don't think you can deny that the spiders will come as a result of your FS listing and is a good reason for expecting an LL to not use the nofollow tag. Perhaps the best and only place for a nofollow tag is strictly on sponsor galleries.

Originally Posted by Carrie

Used to be you could submit a freesite and make 3 sales the first week. Now you're lucky if you make 3 sales in the 6 months that it's up (and then some LL owners rip it down). The traffic ain't what it used to be... hence the LL owners trading with TGPs, increasing required number of pictures, making pictures bigger, etc.

My guess is that lower sales is due to more competition.

[Carrie]

Originally Posted by DJilla

My guess is that lower sales is due to more competition.

Probably a good part of it. I'd love to know if the # of submitters has grown, shrunk, or remained pretty steady over the past 4 years or so. That would be interesting.

I think another factor in less sales might be the sheer number of sites that the larger LLs have in their archives. The ones that have been around a few years have a few hundred thousand sites in there, most likely. I was never up for the "remove the listing after 3/6 months" (because sometimes the SEs don't even notice you for that long or they sandbox you for a while to see if you're gonna stick around), but I'm starting to think that dumping sites that are over a year old might help the submitters make more sales. There would still be a ton of sites to keep the bookmarkers around looking at the LLs ads, so maybe it wouldn't negatively affect the LL owners to do this. Would love your take on it D.