Has my website been penalised by Google?
In some circles it's commonly accepted that if you over submit your website to Google, or any search engine, that you will be penalised for it. In other circles, it's accepted that you can actually submit your website to Google everyday if you like, and that you will never incur any penalties whatsoever for doing so. Google claims that there is actually no penalty for repeatedly submitting your website to them. That's true, and yet, the penalties for over submission are very real indeed.
Why the complete contradiction? Is your website being penalised, or is it not? If it is, by whom? Why? And what are the penalties? All very good questions, and yet the answer is so obvious that it's hard to believe anyone would miss it. But miss it they do, in their thousands every day.
Who is Penalising your website when you over submit?
"Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" - Google Mission Statement
What does this mean to us? Perhaps not a great deal on the surface. However, we all use Google everyday, and rely on it to find the content we were looking for. Google quite rightly prides itself on finding search results faster, and with less fuss, than any other means of search on the internet. Google has invested vast resources in their infrastructure. Estimates are that Google maintains over 450,000 servers, arranged in racks located in clusters in cities around the world, in order to achieve their goal of providing the best search service on the net. Few people would deny that there's is not the best search service.
Googlebot, the Google crawler, enjoys nothing more that juicey, new, unique content. It's always hungry for more and more new content; eager to analyse it, index it, digest it, syndicate it, and generally consume it. It just can't get enough. We must feed it, and feed it often. It has an insatiable appetite for content!
The more content we give Googlebot; the more it wants. The more pages you publish on your website; the more you update and add content to your website; the more often Googlebot will come back to index it. The same is also true if we would prefer that Googlebot not visit us so often. Just feed it less. That means publishing less content. Fewer pages and less frequent site updates. The less we do to feed Googlebot new content, the less interested Googlebot becomes in our website.
Every webmaster, and business owner, hopes to have top search results on Google, and lots of site visitors from the search engines in general. It's when the success we wish for isn't forthcoming that we start to turn to "the dark side", and do things we wouldn't normally consider. Such as repeatedly submitting, and resubmitting, our website to Google in the assumption that doing so is the way to achieve what we want. Some webmasters even attempt to manipulate the search results in more deceptive ways, rather than just impatient ways. However, the deceptive ways, will only lead to your website's demise.
Does Google penalise websites for over submission? No, it does no such thing.
Who is penalising your website when you over submit then? You are!
It's clear that all Google wants is content. Unique, genuinely intersting and engaging content. The more content you offer on your website, the more Google is going to visit your site. The more content you have indexed by Google, unique and interesting content, the more likely your site is to appear in search engine results pages (SERPs). This in turn brings more site visitors and traffic.
Conclusion
Have you ever wondered how much more successful your website might be if you dedicated yourself to it's content?
Google doesn't penalise websites for over submission. However, better to avoid such non-productive tasks and spend all available resources and time on writing or improving the website content.
Think smarter and reap the rewards that a better website will bring for you quite naturally.