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Outdated Principles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.
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