Don't submit your website to any search engines

Trenton Moss
Director at Webcredible

08 July 2004 13:13pm
We all want to get our websites high up in the search engines but how do you do it? Well one thing you shouldn’t bother doing is submit your site to any search engines. That’s right – I’m telling you not to submit your website to any search engines. Not Google, not Yahoo!, not AltaVista. Sound a bit strange? Read on...
Submitting to all the search engines
Submitting your website to every search engine is an incredibly time-consuming process. There are hundreds and hundreds of them out there - no doubt, you’ve come across the companies who’ll submit your website to 1000 search engines for you.
Search engine professionals know that the vast majority of these search engines have a very low usage rate and will drive hardly any traffic your way. In fact, it’s only a handful of search engines that drive the majority of traffic from search engines to websites.
The major search engines
Some of the most important search engines, probably accounting for over 90% of the search engine market, are:
- Google
- Yahoo! (released earlier this year)
- Inktomi
- Teoma
- Fast
- AltaVista
The new MSN search engine will roll out later this year and will also be very important.
Don’t submit to these search engines
“But there’s only six of them - why on earth not!?” Well, aside from saving time and a bit of money (some require a submission fee), quite simply there’s no need. Allow me to explain...
Search engines crawl the web every few weeks (or months) looking for websites to index. Here’s how it works:
- Search engines start at one website with a large number of outbound links (usually a directory)
- They follow every link they come across, indexing each page they arrive at
- Once a page has been indexed they follow all the links from that page
- And so on until there are no more links to follow
Unless today is your very first day on the Internet, you might have heard that inbound links into a website are extremely important in establishing its search engine ranking. If a search engine can’t find you by itself through crawling the web, then your website doesn’t have any inbound links. If so, you’ll never achieve a decent search engine ranking so what’s the point in registering?
Getting incoming links quickly
So, how do you get incoming links? Well, this is a vast topic which I won’t be discussing now, but if you want to get a few good links quickly then there is a solution: web directories. If your website is listed in the Yahoo! directory (http://dir.yahoo.com, not the same as Yahoo! search) and the Open Directory (http://www.dmoz.org, used by Google) all the search engines should find you within two to three months.
There are plenty of other directories you should get listed in too. Global, local and industry-specific directories abound on the Internet. To find them run a search for ‘web directory’ on your favourite search engine. The directories that come up highest in the search rankings will probably generate the most traffic. You can also check the directories of directories listed at the end of this article.
Another even quicker solution is webmaster forums. Search engines love forums because they include so much fresh content. Most have an area where you’re allowed to enter your URL to get feedback from other webmasters. http://www.webmastersterforumlist.com has a list of webmaster forums - sign up to them all and get posting!Long term strategy
Search engine optimisation is a long term strategy. You’ll be successful if you:
- Structure your pages correctly by positioning your keywords in effective places
- Build a great site with unique content that other websites will want to link
Register with as many web directories as possible and then concentrate your efforts on these two things. Within a few months you’ll start to see success.
Directories of directories
Trenton Moss, Webcredible
Chris Baker
Freelance Project Manager at Chris Baker FPM

09 July 2004 16:56pm

I have a concern about "Another even quicker solution is webmaster forums...sign up to them all and get posting!"

Isn't posting to forums simply as a way of advertising your new site to search engines pretty antisocial? If the url of the new site comes in a genuine request for help or as part of a useful posting, fair enough. If you genuinely want feedback about the site from peers and the potential exposure to search engines is a happy side-effect, maybe fair enough. But if realy all you want is exposure to robots and you've dressed it up as a plea to help from people, then surely you're wasting the community's time and good will? This kind of thing could easily lead to the dark side.

What do people in THIS forum think?
William Charlwood Bronze
Director at Commercial Reality Ltd

10 July 2004 17:12pm

I think that when people contribute to forums as opposed to abusing them, then any search engine ranking benefits are fair enough. But the best benefit is not usually simply one of getting links back to your site: if you post sensible contributions, people over time start to value your input and then they visit your site not because you are high on the rankings but because they genuinely believe you might have something to offer. They've seen what you say and trust your opinion or judgement.

Someone who visits one of my sites because they think I talk sense is worth a lot more to me than someone who just happens to click on a search engine link because I've been clever or lucky with my own SEO programme.

The one-off poster who "abuses" a forum will never generate those sort of high-value visitors.
Tom Glasson
Director at Test Partners Limited

14 July 2004 13:27pm

I would agree with much of the article but totally disagree on several points.

1. An article like this should not claim to be the universal truth. The advice may be true for many people but every single item in it will be wrong for some people. The article should specify who it is directed towards and to whom it may not apply but I can see no such caveats.

2. In most cases there are advantages to submitting to search engines, and for most commercial organisations there are benefits in paying for inclusion (we consider it to be a no-brainer). It costs around £200 per year in total to subscribe to the top 5 or 6 engines and this guarantees your site will be indexed every couple of days so new content will be picked up immediately. This is crucial for some companies. If you don’t pay, your site may not be fully indexed and changes may take weeks to be picked up. It takes about an hour in total to register with 5 or 6 engines so the time requirement is no excuse for not doing it.

3. I fully endorse the comments about directories. However, DMOZ is very inconsistent - I know people who have been listed within a couple of weeks but I also know people (ourselves included) who have not been listed after 15 months. Some categories are far worse than others and applying to a different category doesn’t work because DMOZ just move your application to where they think it should go even if there’s a huge backlog. This is disastrous for link popularity because DMOZ feed the vast majority of other directories.

4. With regard to forum submissions, this is verging on irresponsible. There has recently been a lot of discussion in SEO circles about the spamming of blogs, forums, wikis etc (see http://www.webproworld.com/viewtopic.php?t=20971 for an example) and this is not viewed as an acceptable practice. There’s already enough rubbish in many forums without this sort of spam.

5. The article says ’Build a great site with unique content that other websites will want to link’. I totally agree, but for many commercial websites this is not possible. It may be easy if you work in a sexy B2C industry that has general appeal but it’s harder in a B2B business that is of interest to no one but your customers and competitors.

6. It’s possible to get to the very top of the search engine results pages (SERPS) even if you have no incoming links at all, although this will not be possible for competitive keyphrases. If you’re not in a competitive market then that won’t be a problem. Some engines such as Yahoo place more emphasis on on-page optimisation, whereas Google takes more account of link popularity.

7. Not all links are equal. The engines assess how relevant a link is in the context of each individual search. They take into account the topic of the page that is linking to your site and the anchor text of the link. Many links use the URL as anchor text, and this reduces the value of the link. The link is worth more if the anchor text matches the search term. Links from pages with a narrow focus are worth more than links from ’miscellaneous links’ pages especially if the page topic is similar to the search term.

The bottom line is that your search engine strategy depends entirely on your context - for instance pay-per-click is absolutely the right thing for some people and a waste of money for others. Hopefully this article will at least get people talking about it.

Steve Green
Director
Test Partners Ltd
Anthony Sharot Silver
Search Marketing Director at http://www.marketappeal.co.uk/

10 February 2008 02:46am

I agree with the gist of the above article and would like to add that some free business classified sites also have rapid inclusion times, typically under three days, and posts on social-news sites such as Digg can be indexed by Google in under an hour!
Of course, any attempts to spam these sites will result in your post's, if not your account's, rapid deletion, but hopefully that goes without saying.
If you're interested in exploring such strategies, there are already several other good articles on this site to help steer you in the right direction.
Also, I just wrote a related article titled how to quickly get your site indexed by Google to launch my new SEO blog, before finding the post above while looking for similarly themed sites.
All feedback is welcome.
Anthony Sharot
Search Marketing Consultant
www.MarketAppeal.co.uk
Lawrence L
Freelance Web Consultant at architxt.net

12 February 2008 10:09am

Don't webmaster forum links usually include the nofollow attributes?

Having said that, I do see quite a few referrals from forum and blog posts in stats.

Participating in forums and posting to blogs should be part of where SEO and Online PR strategies meet.
Lawrence L
Freelance Web Consultant at architxt.net

12 February 2008 10:16am

Also, write a 'How to _______ in X number of steps' article in your blog and submit it digg, reddit, technorati, feedburner and other similar sites hoping to get people to comment on your post on their own blogs ;)
Anthony Sharot Silver
Search Marketing Director at http://www.marketappeal.co.uk/

12 February 2008 10:36am

Sure, they do.
Although Google does appear to register nofollow links as links, it just doesn't pass on additional PageRank for them.
Besides, if Google, like Yahoo!, are heading towards a (partially) traffic-based ranking system then even nofollow links, if they receive clicks, could become significant.
They're not 100% clear on this one.
Anthony
On 10:09:30 12 February 2008 LawrenceLadomery wrote:

Don't webmaster forum links usually include the nofollow attributes?

Having said that, I do see quite a few referrals from forum and blog posts in stats.

Participating in forums and posting to blogs should be part of where SEO and Online PR strategies meet.