The owners of BogDock purchased customShowroom.com and recently un-indexed the site to add a new look and feel focused more on users searching for top-end home decor.

After redesign, the site was submitted to Google and Yahoo in the hopes of joining the natural listings in both of these name brand search engines. While working at adding a new product line to the thousands of designer home decor products featured, they noticed the servers slowed to a crawl. For approximately 15 minutes, the site was inaccessible. Finally, after several tense moments, access to the site was achieved.

In looking at the server logs, it appeared that Google and Yahoo both sent bots (search engine spiders that read the code of a website page) to index the new site at the same time. None of the staff for Bogdock is technical enough to know what happens when two major search engines show up to index a website at the same time, however one theory persists. They fought.

One of the staff at Custom Showroom was quoted as saying, "It had to be some type of new bot warfare. I mean, why would our servers crash at exactly the same time that each search engine tried to index us? While we rely on search to allow our loyal customer base to find us, we certainly aren't big enough to host boxing matches between search engines. They have thousands of servers, let them fight it out on there own turf."

Whether these two search engine giants indeed are taking the advertising war to small business owners' websites, BogDock can't say. One thing is clear: without being added to the search index of major search engines, e-commerce traffic is practically impossible.

BogDock is a family owned business in Allen, Texas that operates CustomShowroom.com, a posh Home Decor site focused on delivering trendy and designer products in a clean and upscale web environment.