Submitting your site to the engines is a necessary task. If you wait for the SEs’ spiders to find and index your entire site, you could wait forever. Submission hastens the entire listing process along, and guarantees your site doesn’t get lost “between the cracks.” Result? You gain maximum and controlled exposure.
SBI!’s World Submitter automatically submits your pages to each SE exactly
the way it likes to receive submissions. Better yet, it monitors submitted pages
for a spider visit. If a spider does not arrive within an acceptable length of time,
the page is queued for resubmission.
(All pages are “queued” for submission. This ensures you never run afoul of an
SE’s submission policies and keeps you from being banned.)
But World Submitter doesn’t stop there. Once a page is listed, World Submitter
monitors that page to ensure it remains in an SE’s index. Should your page be
dropped, that page is queued for resubmission. Talk about putting your SE
traffic-building strategy on autopilot!
Four of the major free Search Engines will account, either directly through their
own search services or indirectly through partner sites, for about 95% of your
traffic. That’s right, just four!
What about the service I saw the other day offering to submit my site
to 1,000 Search Engines for $29.95?
Avoid these services like the plague. There are only four main SEs, as I said
above. “Submit to all 1,000 Engines” services submit mainly to free-for-all links
pages. They are totally useless, and will do nothing for you but fill your inbox
with an endless barrage of spam.
OK, let’s begin the submission process. I’ve included each SE’s current
protocols here, but please double-check each one to ensure nothing has
changed in the meantime.
Ready? We’re off to the top of the list…
Google
http://www·google·com/addurl·html
Their submission policy (from the same URL)...
“Only the top-level page from a host is necessary; you do not need to
submit each individual page. Our crawler, Googlebot, will be able to
find the rest. Google updates its index on a regular basis, so updated
or outdated link submissions are not necessary. Dead links will 'fade
out' of our index on our next crawl when we update our entire index.”
Google has implemented a graphic challenge on their submission page to
distinguish between manual and automated submissions. Although it is not
currently a requirement, I recommend that you fill in the graphic challenge with
your submission. It’s possible that Google will give precedence to manually
submitted URLs.
Yahoo! Search
http://submit·search·yahoo·com/free/request
Their submission policy (from the same URL)...
“Enter the full URL, including the http:// prefix (for example,
http://www·yahoo·com) of the site you would like to submit. Enter only
the top-level page in your site, our crawler will explore the rest of
your site from there. We will automatically detect and remove dead
links on an ongoing basis.”
MSN Search
http://search·msn·com/docs/submit·aspx?FORM=WSDD2
MSN’s submission policy isn’t clear. They say...
“Type the URL of your homepage. MSNBot follows links from your
homepage to find other pages on your site.”
Although they do not say not to submit others, it would certainly appear that it is
not necessary.
Jeeves/Teoma
No, you cannot submit your site to Ask Jeeves, or the Teoma crawler that powers
it. The only way to make it into this SE’s database is to ensure the Teoma
crawler can find your site on its own by following an in-pointing link. This further
emphasizes the importance of obtaining a few good links for your site. (A link
popularity discussion is coming up shortly.)
OK, now what about all the other valid search services like AOL, Netscape,
AltaVista, and so on?
There is really no need to submit to or track certain engines because they are
either “aggregators” or have become insignificant in importance (although you
may still recognize the name). For example...
AOL and Netscape Search -- these “aggregators” draw from one or more of the
above proprietary SEs.
AltaVista and FAST/AllTheWeb -- now owned and powered by Yahoo!.
HotBot -- now a minor player, it merely offers a choice of proprietary engines.
So submit to the big 4, and forget the rest!