I’ve received more than a few emails from services offering to submit my site to thousands of search engines for under $100. Are these services worthwhile and will they help my search engine positioning?
Yours is a great question. I can’t believe it hasn’t come up before now. E-mail solicitations like the ones you mention have been around as long as the search engines. There actually was a time about a decade ago when the search engines relied on regular submissions to find new pages on the Internet.
Today most search engines find sites by crawling, or “spidering”, from page to page. While a few still offer forms where you can submit or recommend a page for them to visit, most ignore the submissions and entrust their spiders to find the truly important pages.
Search engine submission is not search engine optimization. Submitting your site to search engines is a way to tell the search engines how to find you. And while it may seem that you can’t go wrong for $59.99, you can.
These search engines submission services you mention are a scam. There, we’ve said it.
Surely we’re just begging for a whole series of angry e-mails from these so called submission services. But given that we already received dozens of their solicitations every day what are few more e-mails in our inbox.
Google shares a similar regard for the submission services that use mass email to solicit your business. Read their page about Search Engine Optimizer’s here: http://www.google.com/webmasters/seo.html.
We’ll take it a step further, and say that the services are completely worthless. Worse than worthless, the services are likely to hurt your search engine positioning, and cause your e-mail inbox to be filled with spam.
Let’s get something straight. There are not thousands, or even hundreds, of search engines that matter. Almost all of the searches that take place on the Internet happen at one the of three top search engines. So a service offering to submit your site to thousands of search engines should be suspect at the very beginning.
The sites to which they promise to submit are very often fronts for marketing services that use the search engine submission form as a vehicle to gather sales contacts. When your information is automatically submitted to all of these forms it ends up in the databases of spammers from around the globe who deliver solicitations instead of search traffic.
Submitting your site too often can actually hurt your ranking. It’s a signal to the search engines that you may be trying to manipulate their results.
Rather than wasting your time and money on paid search engine submission services work to secure a few prominent links from established websites and you’re sure to be found.
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