Submitting to Search Engines

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Ask Jeeves Search
 
Yahoo Search
 
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MSN Search
 
 
 
 
Sumitting to search engines is largely a waste of time and money.
 
   
 
There are plenty of businesses out there willing to take your money to submit your site monthly to 150 000 search engines and point out the dire the consequences to your rankings in search engines if you don't.
 
   
 
Look at it this way:  
  1. There are not 150 000 search engines out there. There is only a handful of search engines worth worrying about. The rest are link page spam.
  2. Search engines use spiders or crawlers to crawl the net to find sites on their own. They do that on their own schedule and timeframe, by following links from other sites.
  3. Try this...put up a site with no links coming into it...submit as many times as you want to the search engines that count (ie Google, Yahoo, MSN) and see if you get listed.
  4. Search engines want to rank the most important and relevant sites first - repeated submissions of a website to a search engine will not make a site more important and relevant, so how is the submission going to help?
  5. Submitting to Directories is a different 'kettle of fish' and shoud not be confused with submitting to search engines
  6. Look at it from the search engines perspective - if regular submissions actually did help, everyone would be doing it. Imagine the computing resources that the search engines would then have to devote to all the processing of the "submit url's" that would be made - certainly would be a huge waste of resources and would not in any way lead to better search results (which is what the search engines care about).
 
   
 
So why do search engines have a "Submit URL' form?  
The only reason I can think of is that its a public relations exercise. You feel good that you have actually done something after having submitted. Keep in mind that the 'submit a url' is probably a bit like the 'close door' button on the elevator -- it doesn't work either, but you still push it.
 
   
Search Engine Guidelines:  

Google say "Don't use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our terms of service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google "

MSN say "Generally, if you follow our guidelines, you do not need to send your URL to us for MSNBot to find the site."

 
   
 
Clients expect it  
This is a delimma that web designers and SEO people have to face. Submitting dosen't work or help, but if a non search engine savvy client is shopping around and sees that one business offers this service and another does not, who do they go with? Yes, it is difficult. Clients just need to be educated, but the marketing hype can often win.
 
   
 
Penalty for submitting  
Some of those who offer this paid service, often sound ethical by pointing out the potential of some sort of penalty for 'over submitting' a site or submitting too often. Again, that is another myth. If there was such a thing, then it would be easy to repeatedly submit ones competitor to get them a penalty .... it just does not happen.
 
   
 
The only penalty you can get from submitting to search engines, is that your time (and maybe money) is spent on something that does not work, when it could be better spent on doing something that does actually help.
 
   
 
Want to buy a website submission business?  
Website submission services are a 'dime a dozen'. You can buy a packaged website submission business for as little as $0.99 on eBay. Also, checkout the Google Adsense below - they usualy have ads for website submission services....its probably a very profitable business.
 
   
 
I like the 'warm fuzzies' knowing I have submitted to search engines  
Okay then, here are the submit url pages for: Google; Yahoo; MSN; AllTheWeb; Altavista
 
   
 
Do I need to submit a page when its changed or updated.  
No. The same applies - the search engine crawlers will find it and update it on their own. The time frame does vary from search engine to search engine. For Google, the higher PR pages will get updated in a matter of hours to days and the lower PR sites can take weeks.
 
   
 
How then do you get indexed by search engines?  
There is only one way to get listed on search engines: Links  
There is only one way to rank well on search engines: Have an important and relevant site.
 
   
 
Opinions of others on submitting to search engines:  
Best Free SE Submission Service (Digitalpoint Forum)  
Dispelling Common SEO Myths (Jill Whalen)  
The Truth About Site Submission (Aaron Wall)  
Search engine submission (WebProWorld Forum)  
Why you should NOT submit your site on Search Engines (Wise SEO Blog)  
Search Engine Submit Software - Pros Vs Cons (High Rankings Forum)  
Tool for manual submission to search engines (Digitalpoint Forum)  
It is impossible to find a thread at a SEO forum that the consensus is that submission is actually worthwhile.