The Truth About Submitting To Search Engines
I’m sure you’ve seen them. Sites that claim to submit your pages
to thousands of search engines. They always claim that this is
what you must do to drive serious traffic to your site.
I’ve even seen a site that claims to submit your site to over
800 000 search engines and directories!!!
These are usually lots of Free For All links pages. Don't submit
to them - you will not get any traffic, you will get lots of
spam and the truth is that the real search engines, the ones
that you need to be listed in, will probably penalise you for
using them.
It’s time for you to know the real truth about submitting to
search engines.
So here it is – there are five search engines that you need to
be listed in. That’s right, five! Add to that three directories
that are useful but not “required” and you possibly have eight
places that will actually send you traffic.
So, is it worth paying anything to have your site submitted to
these eight places? You may think that you need to submit your
site every month so maybe it’s worth paying.
You do not need to submit your site each month. It’s actually a
ridiculous claim made by some submission companies. Why would
you need to re-submit your site if it’s already listed? It
doesn’t make any sense!
You actually don’t need to submit your site to search engines at
all. You can, but it won’t get you listed any quicker.
OK, the five search engines that you need to be listed in are
Google (http://www.google.com), AltaVista
(http://www.altavista.com), Inktomi
(http://www.inktomi.com/products/web_search/submit.html),
AllTheWeb (http://www.alltheweb.com) and Teoma
(http://www.teoma.com). You may be thinking “what about AOL,
Lycos, HotBot, Excite and so on?”. These sites all use the
results of others.
For example: AOL uses Google, Lycos uses AllTheWeb, Excite uses
results from a number of others, AskJeeves uses Teoma, HotBot
uses Google, Inktomi, AllTheWeb and Teoma.
So, how do you get listed?
Inktomi and Teoma only accept paid submissions – or that’s what
they’d have you believe. AltaVista and AllTheWeb offer free
submissions but you get listed quicker if you pay. Google is
free.
Should you pay to be listed? I generally recommend no because
you can get listed for free. Also, Google is by far the most
popular search engine so why pay search engines who will send
less traffic?
However, if you need to be listed very quickly, it may be worth
the investment.
If you don’t want to pay, you can get still listed in all the
search engines. They all crawl the web with a robot to find
pages. They do this by following links.
Something that Inktomi and Teoma don’t tell you is that they do
add sites that haven’t paid. In fact, they do it all the time.
Therefore, to get listed in the search engines that ask you to
pay, exchange links with sites that they have already indexed.
If you find sites that rank highly for keywords that relate to
your site and exchange links with them, all the search engines
will crawl your site and include it in their index. It may take
a few months but they will do it.
Just make sure that the sites that these search engines think
are important have got links to you – this makes you important!
Google is much simpler. If you have a couple of links pointing
to your site, Google will probably find you. They crawl the web
at the beginning of each month and update at the end so you
could get listed within 3 weeks or so. Sometimes, it can take
about 7.
Just make sure you have links pointing to your site.
If you submit your site to Google, they do actually list it
within a few days but they then remove it from their database –
unless it updates very frequently. Even if you do submit your
site and it gets crawled, Google won’t really index it unless it
can find links pointing to you.
So, you can get listed in all five search engines without
submitting your site at all. Also submitting doesn’t get you in
quicker (unless you pay).
Now, I mentioned three directories. These are Yahoo
(http://www.yahoo.com), LookSmart (http://www.looksmart.com) and
DMOZ (http://www.dmoz.com). Yahoo and LookSmart require payment.
I generally don’t recommend submitting to them unless you can
afford it. If your marketing budget is tight, don’t bother
paying.
You actually get listed on Yahoo and LookSmart by being indexed
by Google and Inktomi respectively. If someone uses the search
function at Yahoo, the results are from Google.
LookSmart can be useful because their results are used by MSN.
So, if you can afford it, go for it. If not, don’t worry too
much.
The other directory is DMOZ. It’s free to get listed but it can
take months before they include you. The beauty of being listed
here is that their directory is used by many other very popular
sites such as Google, Netscape and so on.
You must submit to DMOZ manually. Find the right category and
submit your site. DO NOT under any circumstances re-submit. I’ve
read so many times that you should wait a month or two and then
re-submit. Don’t.
Guess what re-submitting to DMOZ really does. It pushes your
site to the bottom of the list! Each time you re-submit, you are
actually adding to the time it will take you to be listed.
So, submit your site, wait six weeks and if your site isn’t
listed then go to http://www.resource-zone.com/. They have a
special forum there that allows you to ask about your
submission. Keep in mind one thing – these people are
volunteers. Be very polite, don’t make demands and they will
help you out.
Please note: Be sure to check DMOZ thoroughly to make sure you
aren’t listed. They may have put you in a different category so
look around. Also, their search function is not always
synchronized with their database so don’t rely on that to find
your site.
The places that I have listed above will bring you the vast
majority of your traffic. There are other search engines and
directories around which you can submit to but they generally
won’t send you any traffic. The only other thing you should look
at are regional or topical directories that relate to your site.
Finally, here is something else that I always found amusing
about submission services. For years, AltaVista actually removed
any site that was submitted if they already knew about it. They
assumed that the site must have changed so they’d delete all
pages relating to it until they had time to crawl it again. This
could take weeks.
Strangely, the automatic submission services never seemed to
mention this :-)
Remember that just getting listed in the search engines will not
bring you traffic. You must have good listings. This is where
Rankings Revealed comes in.
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Sean Burns is the author of Search Engine Rankings Revealed. This eBook
provides a step by step guide to helping the search engines send
you traffic. His sites received almost 1 million highly targeted
visitors from search engines last year. Rankings Revealed will
show you how to do it
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