Search Engine Submitters – It’s A Scam!
“Get Traffic To Your Site – Fast!”, “Get Millions of Visitors a Day”, “Submit Your Site to 1,000 Search Engines”.
If you’ve spent any time online trying to sell a product or promote an affiliated product, you’ve probably seen all these claims. You shell out $29.95 every month to have your site submitted on a regular basis to 1,000 (and growing!) search engines.
Are these services for real? A lot of hosting services, domain vendors, web designers, SEO “specialists” and marketing “Gurus” would appear to believe it, for they promote these services alongside their own products. The truth is though, that they are simply affiliates of these services and earn a nice monthly income if you sign up through their link. Of course they’ll promote the service if they’re making money from it.
There are a few fundamental problems underlying the claims that these services make, and this article endeavours to expose them.
1,000 search engines?
No! There really aren’t that many search engines. There are thousands of search engine portals, but the underlying search engines are usually one of the big guns. If you were to look under the hood of one of the minor search engines, you’ll find that it’s “powered by” Yahoo or Google or Bing/MSN etc. If your site is already in Google, there’s no point in submitting it to a search engine powered by Google.
Minor Search Engines = Almost Zero Traffic
Even if there were 1,000 search engines, the majority of search engine queries are made through just 3 or 4 search engines; Google, Yahoo! and Bing and MSN, which most of what’s left mopped up by Baidu, Ask, AOL and AltaVista.
Is there really any point in submitting your site to a search engine that gets less than 0.01% of search engine traffic?
Outdated Principles
Way back in the 1990s, the ranking order in the search engine results pages (SERPs) was determined by how recently the site was found by the search engine. As a result, a lot of people would re-submit their site every week to “renew” its presence, thus bringing it to the top of the SERPs. This method of ranking was abandoned long ago in favour of the more realistic quality and popularity of content. Once your site is in a search engine, there’s little point is submitting it again. The spiders will revisit it from time to time, and if your content is fresh, dynamic and unique, the frequency of those visits will increase.
Speed
If you submit your site to a search engine, it can actually take several weeks for the spiders to visit your site, when it finally makes its way to the front of the queue. There are much quicker ways to get into the search engines – often within 24 hours.
Links Will Do The Job For You
As I mentioned above, once your site is in the search engines, there’s no need to re-submit it. If your site is not in the search engines, one of the quickest way to get it in there is by getting a link to it from a large, popular site that gets indexed frequently. You could do this by:
- Setting up a free Blogger blog (Google owns Blogger) and linking to your site
- Submitting an article to an article directory, including a link to your site in the resource box. Check first that the site you use has FOLLOW set on its links, otherwise the spiders will pass it by.
- Submit a comment on somebody else’s, related site.
- Join a forum and put a link to your site in the signature of your posts.
You Need Links to Rank Highly
It doesn’t matter how often you submit your site to the search engines – it won’t make any difference to your site’s position in the result pages. To get a high rank, you need links to your site and good quality content. There are other factors involved, but concentrating on getting relevant links will have more effect than monthly submissions to the search engines.
Spam Risk
If your site contains a contact email address, after submitting to one of these services, the amount of spam you receive will go through the roof. Some of these so-called search engines are simply fronts for sites that harvest email addresses and sell them on.
Worthless Sites
Some of the “thousands of search engines” are often junk or spam sites with no specific topic or category, making the links they make back to your site completely worthless in SEO terms, and could actually harm your rank in the big search engines.
You Don’t Need to be in the Search Engines!
That may sound like a strange statement, but it’s true. Not all traffic comes from direct clicks from search engines. Article directories, such as Article Content King are experts at getting their articles into the search engines, very rapidly and ranking highly. If you submit good quality articles with links to your site in the resource box, people will find your articles, read them and follow the link. So it’s the article directory that gets into the search engine, but you still get the traffic. What’s more, that traffic is more likely to be people who are genuinely interested in what you have to offer – targeted traffic.
Alternatives
If you’re considering subscribing to one of these services, I would recommend that you spend your money on something more worthwhile. Use the money to buy well-written articles from freelance authors and submit them to several article directories instead. Better still, save the money and do it yourself. But don’t be tempted to start flooding the article directories with junk articles created using poor-quality article spinners. Most high-quality article directories will reject them, and some will even ban you from submitting further articles.
The advantage of “article marketing” as this is known, is that many other sites will syndicate or copy and publish the articles, thus duplicating the number of links to your site. Not only will the articles containing your links rank highly in the results pages, but eventually your site pages will, too.
Having said all this, you may be wondering why I have a search engine submission form on this site. Well, let’s put it this way:
- It submits to just 20 search engines – not 1,000 spammy sites.
- If you have a new site that is definitely not in the search engines yet, there’s no harm in submitting it once.
- It’s FREE! If you really want to submit your site once a month (even though it’s unnecessary), come back and do it again for free.
Do You Ever Read All That Stuff?
There’s hardly a day goes by that I don’t receive several emails offering yet another report or ebook or video series for sale. I passed the stage of jumping on the back of all those dreams a long time ago – I don’t waste my money on them any longer.
Occasionally though, one comes along that is free, and like most people, I like free stuff, so I download it. Inevitably, I have to sign up to another list to get it, and I’m also faced with the hard sell of the OTO (One Time Offer). It has to be a REALLY special offer to get me to part with my cash for the OTOs as well.
Today was no exception to the rule – I received several emails offering me stuff to help me get started on line, and one of them was free, so I went to collect it as usual.
I downloaded it just fine, but then came the “unadvertised bonuses” – additional material that wasn’t mention on the original sales letter page.
By the time I’d finished, I had 3 reports or ebooks, a video series and some software.
After I’d finished downloading it all, I’d kind of forgotten what I’d originally gone to the site for. Overwhelmed with the volume of stuff, I pushed it to the back of my mind and realising just how long it would take to work through it all, I just condemned it to gather digital dust on my hard drive, with the good intention of getting back to it later.
The problem is, I never get back to it. It happens so often that I know my hard drive is cluttered with never-opened ebooks, never-watched videos, and never-listened-to audio files.
My time is precious and I don’t want to devote it all to reading or watching all that stuff. And somehow I know that it won’t tell me anything new. It won’t give me that stay-at-home income I’m looking for along with everyone else.
I can’t be alone in this. Surely everybody else is also downloading (and maybe even paying for) material that they never look at.
So it makes me wonder why the marketers give us so much stuff. It looks good, I guess. Value for money. ”This guy’s a good one – look at the amount of stuff he’s given us”.
It’s all to sucker us into remaining on their mailing list and buying more stuff.
Resist the temptation! Stop accumulating stuff!
Don’t Disable Right-Click on your Wesite
A lot of people seem to get paranoid about others copying the content of their websites. Whether it’s the textual content, images or Javascript functions, these site owners try to make it difficult or impossible for anybody to copy them.
This is usually done by adding some script to the web page which disables the right-click menu. Instead, you get a little message-box saying Right-Click disabled. Content is Copyright.
Do you really think that is going to stop somebody from viewing your page source or copying your images? It doesn’t. Every function that you find on the right-click menu is generally available from the browser’s main menu. Want to view the source of a page that has right-click disabled? Simply go to the browser’s View menu and click Source. Want to copy the images? You can Save (use the File | Save menu) the entire page with all its associated images. Alternatively, now that you know how to view the source of a “protected” page, you can get the URL of the image from the source and enter it into a new browser window or tab. You’ll get the image in a page of its own and the right-click menu will not be disabled. Of course, anyone with a screen-grabbing program can get any image off any page.
I’m not encouraging you to steal other peoples’ property, so why am I telling you how to do this? Well for a start, it’s not some secret that the average person couldn’t work out for themselves. Most of all, though, it is to discourage website owners from even bothering to disable the right-click menu.
The right-click menu on most browsers contains items other than View Source and Save Image. They also include handy functions such as Back, Forward, Print, Bookmark page etc. By disabling the right-click menu, you’re alienating people who are used to using those functions.
Finally, users of the Opera Browser who have discovered the fantastic mouse gestures used to navigate sites will really hate you for disabling the right-click menu. When you’ve got used to holding the right mouse button down and dragging left to go Back and right to go Forward, you don’t want to go revert to using toolbar buttons or menus.
As a long-time Opera user, I usually navigate away from sites that disable the right-click. If I was a potential customer of yours, you lost me for good.
So don’t bother disabling the right-click menu. It annoys the visitors and there are several ways around it anyway.
Catch-All Email Accounts
If you have a web hosting account, with one or more domains hosted on it, then you probably have several email accounts set up, too.
Let’s say that you have a domain, www.MyDomain.com, and have created a few mail accounts; your.name@MyDomain.com, sales@MyDomain.com, and support@MyDomain.com.
What happens if somebody sends an email to accounts@MyDomain.com? There is no email account with that name, so there is no mailbox to store it in.
The answer is that it goes into the hosting account “catch-all” account mailbox. The mail account name is usually the same as your hosting account name, so if you log in with the name “johndoe”, then your catch-all email account will be johndoe@MyDomain.com.
You will find that once you’ve had your domain for just a few weeks, you’ll start getting spam messages sent to non-existent email addresses at your domain. These messages will end up in your catch-all mailbox.
I usually set up my email program to delete the messages in the catch-all account. Whenever I pick up my email, the catch-all account gets emptied, and I never see all that spam. (Take note, spammers – it all gets deleted, so why bother sending it?)
When I upgraded my PC with a new hard disk a few months ago, I forgot to set up the catch-all account handler. I finally remembered yesterday, and discovered there were 83,331 spam messages in there, occupying some 231Mb of disk space.! It took about 2 hours to delete them all.
Most catch-all accounts have an unlimited mailbox size, so if you don’t empty them regularly, they will just eat up your hosting disk space. I estimate that my catch-all account is receiving about 1000 spam messages per day, so it soon bulds up if not cleaned out regularly.
So if you don’t do it already, check your catch-all account and clean it out regularly. You don’t want to fill your hosting account disk with spam.
Google Webmaster Tool Verification Update
If you use Google Webmaster Tools to find out information and statistics about your websites, you’ll know that to access that information you must Verify that you are the owner of the site. You can do this in one of two ways:
- By adding a META tag to your home page. This will include a code that uniquely identifies your Google account. If you are able to edit the home page, then you must be the owner (or authorised user)
- By uploading an HTML file to your site’s root directory. The name of this file is your unique code, with an HTML extension. For example, it might be googlec9e7c4d1799410bc.html. Again, if you have the privilege to upload his file, then you must be the owner or authorised user.
There are advantages and disadvantages to using the two different methods.
META Tag
Using the META Tag means that you do not have any extra HTML files lying around in your root directory. It’s really not important except for the sake of tidiness.
The disadvantage is if you decide to completely renew your web home page. If you forget to include the META tag in the new page, then you will have to re-validate the site when you log in to Webmaster Tools.
Similarly, if you use something like WordPress, you might be unsure about editing the WordPress theme files to iniclude the META Tag. And if you switch to a different theme, you’ll have to go through the process all over again.
HTML File
This is my preferred method, because you only have to do it once. As long as you don’t delete the file, then you can change as much of your website as you want without having to re-verify it.
The disadvantage is that you might accidentally delete the file, especially if you do a site-wide rewrite.
Having said that you only have to do it once, though, I recently found that I had to re-verify all my sites because Google changed the mechanism slightly.
Originally, all you had to do was to create a file with the name Google specify, and upload it to your site’s root directory on your host server.
I always used an empty file with the correct name and it worked just fine.
Now, the file must have some content as specified by Google. In fact, they now supply a file for you to download and then upload to your server. The file now contains a line of text that looks like:
google-site-verification: googlec9e7c4d1799410bc.html
So unless you verified your sites recently or use the META Tag method, you’ll probably find that you’ll need to re-verify your sites next time you log in.
Fortunately, the code that they give you applies to your user account – not to the site. This means the same file can be uploaded to all of your websites for verification purposes.
Article Marketing
