Life in the Virtual Ghetto: If you live in a small country, say,
Azerbaijan, and you decide to put up a website on a topic that is not
exclusively on or about Azerbaijan (where you would have very little global
competition on the theme), you will notice that it will take a long time
for search engines to pick up your site and list them first in their
searches. This is because the
spiders and little “bots” go first to the huge commercial sites hosted by
Inktomi, etc., then they move on to the well-known commercial provider
sites, then to free sites (tripod, geocities, angelfire, lycos) – they move
slowly into the often over-extended and busy regional internet service
provider web-hosting servers. And,
if the search engine is one where consultants actually evaluate the sites,
the fact the layout does not conform to global “standards” also leads to
the fact that they won’t be picked up.
They are, de facto, excluded and/or marginalized. If you live in a tiny ISP ghetto, your
best approach is to upload mirror sites onto free servers (geocities, etc.)
to increase presence – and do at least part of the home page in English. Return to English Language
Hegemony on the Internet home.
Ghettoization of non-English sites
© susan smith nash, 2002