Do I Submit?

Many of our customers ask if we submit their web site to any of the search engines, and if so how many search engines do we submit their site to?

There are obviously many so called Search Engine Optimizers (SEO) who concentrate purely on offering a service where all they do is charge a set fee to re-submit your web site pages (or more often than not just your home page) to thousands of search engines every month. This sounds great, especially the way they sell they’re service, but the reality is, it is a fairly futile exercise. Simply submitting your web site to the search engines, especially the ones that count such as Google, MSN, Yahoo and Ask, probably won’t hurt your web site. In fact Google clearly states on its Webmaster Information pages, “We don’t require submission nor do we penalize sites for ‘over-submission.’ You’re free to submit as often as you wish. However, given the nature of our inclusion process, your time is better spent improving the content and links of your site.”

Your web site should be submitted once to the top search engines, but there may be a substantial delay before their spiders and bots get round to indexing your pages. Every effort should be made to gain links from high quality, related web sites to specific content on your site. Don’t be tempted by link farms. Google for one frowns upon the services link farms offer.

The bottom line is keep it simple, build on the quality of the content on your site and encourage relevant links, don’t waste time and money paying for an ineffective re-submission service. As part of our SEO4Biz and SOE2U packages we will submit your web site to Google, MSN and Yahoo. It has not been possible to submit to Ask.com and Teoma since August 2004. AltaVista, AllTheWeb and other search portals use the Yahoo search engine.