Submitting Your Site To The Search Engines

Summary : Search engine submission is a waste of time and doesn't help your search engine rankings. Letting the search engines know about your site is important, but there are better ways to achieve this.

A typical question from new webmasters will revolve around submitting a site to the search engines; how to do it, whether there are any automated ways to do it, and how often it should be done. From the tone of the questions, it is often clear that they are unaware of the greater world of SEO beyond submitting a site.

To clear up any doubt, here are the correct answers to those three questions (I will elaborate on these answers presently).

• Don't.
• Yes, but don't.
• Never.

The quote below is taken from a reply to such a question, and typifies the kind of bad advice that abounds on the Internet on the subject of promoting a website.

I do my own promotions and I can tell you that it helps to submit them. Don't submit it just to a few, try to submit your website to as many as possible to increase the hits to your site (which will actually help your search engine ranking). I submit my websites every month.

Not only has this person confirmed the misconception that submitting a website to the engines regularly is actually necessary, he's also propagated the outright lie that doing so somehow brings more traffic to your site, which in turn directly helps to increase search engine rankings!

Why Search Engine Submission Is Completely Unnecessary

Let's clear one thing up right away; submitting your site to a search engine doesn't help you achieve a better search engine ranking. It never has, not even in the heady early days of the mid to late 1990's.

Back then, the whole submission system was created because search engines didn't have enough programming power to discover and index content at the rate it was being created. They actually needed help from website owners to find new stuff. But that's the only function that submission has ever had and ever will have; to let the engines know about the existence of your site.

Nowadays, search engines do just fine finding new content by following links from websites they already know about. With just one link on a single website, you can have search engines crawling all over your site within a matter of days.

Here are the advantages to letting the search engines discover your site via a link, versus submitting them manually.

• Typically, the time it takes the engines to index your site is far quicker than the standard wait associated with search engine submission.
• Economy of effort. A single link can be followed by all search engines. Submitting manually to Google only works on Google.
• Potential ranking benefits. Links are a crucial part of ranking well on the search engines. It makes sense to get a jump on your linkbuilding by starting as you mean to go on.

Taking these facts into account, it's easy to see why search engine submission, either manual or automatic, is essentially a waste of time.

Until this becomes common knowledge I will continue to tell new webmasters as much, and direct them to SEO For Complete Beginners, a short e-book designed to introduce the real basic essentials of successful search engine optimisation.

A Question Nobody Asks

Could submitting my site multiple times be a bad thing?

We've already established that it's not a good thing. The next thing to realise is that repeatedly submitting a site to a search engine can trigger a flag with that engine that marks your site as spam.

If this happens you will have achieved exactly the opposite of what you set out to do; your site will either lose ranking, be relegated to the supplemental index, not be crawled in the first place, or a combination of the three.

This problem is historically associated with automatic submission tools and services. If after reading this article you still for some reason insist on submitting your site to the engines, use submission tools with great care, and do not under any circumstances sign up to an automatic submission service that you have no control over.