Should You Submit?

Search engine submissions — don't fall for the myth!

Should you SUBMIT to the search engines?

Whenever I hear the word "submit" I picture an animal rolling over to expose its soft underbelly, which is what they do when confronted by a stronger, more dominant animal.

Search engine submissions are completely unnecessary. Don't waste your time looking for free tools to automate the process, or worse, actually paying someone for search engine submission services!

You don't need to roll over for the search engines in order to get your site listed! And you certainly don't have to sit up and beg, either. Besides, it's just not dignified.

Is your site worthy of free search engine traffic?

If you're positive your site is worthy of a listing, and ready for prime time, simply let the search engines find YOU. How do they do that? By crawling through another site that has a link to yours. All you have to do is get one site to link to you.

Sure, you can submit your site to the search engines. But the thing is, without at least one link from another site, you won't get indexed. So it's a complete waste of time!

Many people are under the mistaken impression that in order to get into the search engines they need to submit their Web site often: daily, weekly, monthly, hourly, you name it. They don't realize the engines will crawl every link it finds from the home page, so many will submit each and every page on the site. Naturally, that becomes a bit tiring (imagine how the search engines feel!) so then they look for software tools to do it for them. For one thing, using search engine submission software is against Google's Terms of Service. And repeatedly pestering the search engines manually is really not such a good idea, when you think about it. At best, you'll be ignored; at worst, blacklisted!

The bottom line? Search engine submissions will get you nowhere.

However... there is a back door into Google's index. I discovered this by accident when I was building a new Web site. The site started getting traffic from Google while it was still under construction! So how did Google find out about it? Well, I had the Google Toolbar installed on my browser. There was simply no other way G. could have known about it. I didn't submit it, and no one else (except for the domain registrar and my Web host) knew it even existed. It's highly unlikely that Google would troll the domain registry to find new registrations. (Easily half of all domains purchased are not used, or planned to be used, for a website.)

Here's what Google's own page says about this: "...if you choose to enable the Google Toolbar's advanced features (e.g., viewing the PageRank of web pages), the URLs of the sites you visit will automatically be forwarded to Google." (from http://www.google.com/support/toolbar/?quick=privacy)

The only trouble is, Google probably won't keep the site in its index if it doesn't acquire at least one outside link, and soon.

And of course the site that links to you must be listed in Google's index for the link to do any good. To find out if it is listed, go to Google and type link:www.(insertdomain.com).

And then you will need to acquire many, many more links to rank well in Google! (The other engines don't place quite as much importance on link popularity, while Google sees each link as a "vote" for your site.) New to link-building? Don't worry, there are zillions of ways to get links from other sites (and without violating Google's policy against link schemes). That's a topic that will be addressed in an upcoming article.