First problem: slow indexing

Search engines do a poor job of indexing new content at most sites. The bots that Google and other search engines use to scour web pages for new information may visit a site once every few weeks. If that isn't bad enough, consider this: They may take several years to find every page in your site, even if you do everything you should to help them find your content (such as including a site map and HTML links).

Surprised? So were we. One of our other sites has consistently been rated #1 by Google for years for some popular search terms. Because that site is always at the top of the listings, it is safe to assume that the Google algorithm that evaluates websites thinks highly of it. If Google thinks enough of it to always rank it #1, one would think that the Google bot would index every page in the site. However, after we signed up for Google Alerts (a service that notifies users of new info about a topic or search term), we discovered that the Google bot was finding information we posted years ago.

Second problem: no way to reconnect with visitors

Here is yet another problem with relying on search engines to drive traffic to your site: they do a good job of getting new visitors to your site (if you are lucky enough to be near the top of the rankings), but they have no mechanism for helping you reconnect with visitors who enjoyed your content. The assumption is that visitors will bookmark sites they like. The creator of this site has bookmarked over 10,000 sites but revisited only a few hundred of them and regularly visits perhaps two dozen. In other words, over 99% of those sites failed to achieve what is arguably their primary objective: getting visitors to return again and again.

Many of those sites had superb content, and most of them likely added more of it after it was bookmarked and forgotten. We would have revisited many more of those sites if we knew about those compelling additions, but most sites don't offer any way to let us know what they added, and virtually none offer a good way.

In our opinion, RSS isn't a good way. It is primarily appealing to geeks who tolerate its many limitations. Most average and even smart, experienced computer users don't know how to use it. So they don't. Bottom line? Adding a RSS button may make webmasters feel good, but 99% of them are still striking out. Is there a better way?

Yes! Track-this.info is intuitively easy to use whether you are registering a topic for others to track, or signing up to track a topic. We are what RSS should have been, but we're much more, too. We offer capabilities that solve some of the most vexing Internet problems, such as how to permit people to freely contact one another without incurring a risk of spam. In short, we give you the freedom and power to do many of the things you've always wanted to do.