My Website and search engines - advice please?

Hi all
Im not sure if this is the correct place for this question, so input from the mods is welcome.
In brief, i have a small website on custom biking (url in my profile)and recently have been getting emails from what appears to be a search engine regarding updating my listing on their service. Couple of things make me a bit suspicious here:
The thing is that I have never submitted the site to them (or anyone else for that matter)
the email headers have the return addy as
<owner-LISTINGS@WWW--SEARCH.COM> strange format?
and also sometimes
www--search.com (ns1.www-goto.com [202.14.69.2])
Now i have googled these and it doesnt seem to clear as to what/ who they are, there is some link with overture i think, and some suggestion that they (goto) might be a bit iffy.
Any ideas?

jock

 

Spambots.

They crawl websites, grab emails of the webmasters, then send spam.

PS You don't need to submit your sites to search engines, most search engines have automatic web crawlers that index pages as long as you are linked from a site that has already being indexed. This includes google.

 

Thanks for that, I was a bit puzzled as to what was going on.

Jock

 

Use a robot.txt file in your web root directory to limit access to your site for robots and spiders: Tutorial

 

thanks meneer, will do

jock