I’ve always been of the opinion that it is important to host your own web site or sites, ever since I first started studying how search engines behave.

At the moment there are lots of free and paid web site building services, aimed predominantly at the small business and personal user sectors.

They have a place in the market, as many smaller companies and hobbyist individuals don’t have the resources to go out and build themselves a site and many more don’t have the budget to employ a company or Internet hotshot to build one for them.

I took the time and trouble to learn all I needed to know very early on, so these days, playing catch-up with newer technologies isn’t that big a deal and after more than 10 years of being online, I can still achieve top ten Google ranking for my own sites and convert those rankings into money.

But now, with so many instant site builders on the market, it’s easy to see why people will be tempted to use them in preference to employing somebody or having to learn everything from scratch.

The prospect of being able to simply log in to a web site, add some text and pictures and have a web site published instantly is tempting to say the least.

However, Yoast.com has today published a very strong argument against usingsuch site builders and highlights the case of GoDaddy, which charges its customers for using the site builder, but then adds a number of links by way of anchor text to the bottom of every web site it produces – all pointing back to them of course.

It is possible to turn them off, if you know how, but of course, we are dealing with Internet newbies here and it’s highly probable that they don’t know how to turn such links off.

It’s not illegal (as Yoast declares), but is questionable practice to say the least and of course GoDaddy aren’t the first to use other people’s sites and web properties in this way.

Google say that footer text isn’t an important factor in search engine ranking terms, but Yoast’s research along with the help of  Search Metrics suggests otherwise.

Read the article here and while you’re there, download his excellent SEO plugin – it’s the only one I use these days.