How many search engines do you think there are on the web? 1? 3? 10?
I don’t actually have the answer to that question, but I do know that there are a lot of search engines, many of which neither you nor I will ever use. That doesn’t mean that other people won’t use them so it makes sense to get your website listed in them just in case. Right?
Most search engines offer webmasters the ability to submit their websites for inclusion in their search database.
For example, Google says,
We add and update new sites to our index each time we crawl the web, and we invite you to submit your URL here. We do not add all submitted URLs to our index, and we cannot make any predictions or guarantees about when or if they will appear.
MSN says,
Submitting your site doesn’t guarantee that your site will be indexed, but it does help us locate your site so that MSNBot can try to crawl it. MSNBot doesn’t automatically crawl sub-pages on your website. If you want MSNBot to index other pages on your website, submit URLs for those pages.
MSNBot may crawl sub-pages that are linked to from other websites. Your site ranking in the index improves as other websites link to your website.
Yahoo says,
The goal of Yahoo! Search is to discover and index all of the content available on the web to provide the best possible search experience to users. The Yahoo! Search index, which contains several billion web pages, is more than 99% populated through the free crawl process. Yahoo! also offers several ways for content providers to submit web pages and content directly to the Yahoo! Search index and the Yahoo! Directory
At first, these submission points might seem like a great way to get your website indexed, but with so many search engines to submit to this can seem like a mammoth task. Fortunately, there are people who are willing to submit your website to hundreds and even thousands of different search engines. Some will even submit your website repeatedly to the same engines in order to make sure it’s well established and all for a low, low monthly fee.
What a load of rubbish. It’s no wonder that search engine optimisers get such a bad name.
Here’s what I think is all wrong with services that offer search engine rankings improvements through this route:
- Targeting inconsequential search engines. These big three search engines collectively make up for over 80% of all web searches carried out online. Where’s the value in spending money trying to get into anything else unless it’s niche specific?
- Multiple submissions give more benefit. Once a search engine knows about a website, why would it need to be told about it again? At least MSN are very specific and state that you might want to submit different URLs, but really a webmaster should be thinking about establishing inbound links from external websites because “MSNBot may crawl sub-pages that are linked to from other websites. Your site ranking in the index improves as other websites link to your website.”
Okay, perhaps this method of search engine promotion isn’t such a chocolate teapot if no other promotion or linking whatsoever was being carried out, but then spending that money on a linking campaign would offer so much more. Even MSN tells you that!
The next time you get offered a service like this, ask them to explain the basis for their logic because I really don’t have a clue!
Technorati Tags: SEO, search engine submission
I remember, back in the day, part of my job with my first (and last) employer was to run the site submission software once a month. Submitting to 10,000 search engines and link sites, directories etc. It didn’t make much difference strangely enough. You’d get on a link site for about 5 minutes before you fell off the max 50 links page or something like that. To be honest I think it just attracted more spam.
Ahh those were the days
I think some people are still selling such a service!
I think there is no need to submit to the major search engines now
they index new sites pretty quickly if they don’t see you as spam.