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Search Engine Articles
Your Guide To The Search
Engine Submission Jungle
By Dan Thies
One of my favorite "scams that won't die" are the companies that drop SPAM into
my inbox every week offering to submit my website to "thousands" of search
engines for the low low price of $20 a month.
If you want to get the most out of your search engine submission time, there are
exactly eight (8) places where your site needs to be found. That's 5 crawling
search engine databases, and 3 directories. Before we get into the strategies
you can use, here is the lineup:
The Crawling Search
Engines:
Google (powers Google, AOL, IWon, and Yahoo!) Inktomi (powers MSN, Hotbot, and
others) FAST/AllTheWeb (powers AllTheWeb.com and Lycos.com) Altavista (powers
Altavista) Wisenut (powers Wisenut, may be feeding Teoma/Ask.com)
The Directories:
Yahoo!
Looksmart
Open Directory
Crawling Search Engine Strategy #1: Let 'em find you Getting into all 5 major
crawling search engine databases (there are no others worth your time) can be
done easily - just get enough other sites to link to yours, and they'll find
you... it took less than 2 weeks for all of them to find and crawl my new site
last fall.
Crawling Search Engine Strategy #2: Buy your way in! Altavista and Inktomi offer
"paid inclusion" programs, where you pay them a fee and they keep your site's
listing up to date. It isn't cheap. Altavista's program costs $39 every six
months for a single URL, and Inktomi's is $39 a year for the same thing. My
advice is to buy Inktomi's service for your site's main page, if you just can't
wait for them to find you.
Altavista Paid Inclusion:
http://www.infospider.com
Inktomi Paid Inclusion:
http://www.inktomi.com/products/search/pagesubmission.html
Crawling Search Engine Strategy #3: Free submission
I think submitting pages to search engines is a waste of time. Most search
engines actually rank your pages higher if they find them on their own, and at
least one of them (Google) won't include your pages until they find at least one
link to your domain.
However, since I know you
can't resist the temptation, here are the 5 places to submit your site for free:
Google http://www.google.com/addurl.html Inktomi http://hotbot.lycos.com/addurl.asp
FAST http://www.alltheweb.com/add_url.php Altavista http://addurl.altavista.com/sites/addurl/newurl
Wisenut http://www.wisenut.com/submitsite.html
Directories: Who Feeds Who
The Yahoo! directory is the most important - a Yahoo! listing is said to be
worth the equivalent of 100 link swaps, in terms of how it affects your search
engine rankings. It now costs $299 a year to get a commercial site listed... and
that's only if it's good enough to be included - the first $299 is paid
up-front, and they keep it even if they don't list your site.
Note: Yahoo has switched to using Google results as its primary search, in
September of 2002. While it still appears that a Yahoo! listing boosts your
ranking on the Yahoo! search, and it's still good for link popularity, you
should not expect significant traffic from the Yahoo! directory itself, unless
you are doing well on Google.
The Looksmart Directory (http://www.looksmart.com) is important "right now"
because the MSN search portal (which is plugged into Internet Explorer by
default) uses a combination of Looksmart results, DirectHit rankings, and
Inktomi search results. If your site is not in Looksmart, you be likely to won't
rank well on MSN.
Looksmart charges a one-time fee of $299 to review your site. If MSN ever stops
using Looksmart's database, your listing won't be worth much - Looksmart.com
itself gets minimal traffic. Looksmart also charges per click-through, so your
one-time fee may be eaten up by click charges if you get enough traffic.
A non-commercial site can be submitted to Looksmart through Zeal (http://www.zeal.com),
which is free, but time-consuming - you have to take a test! It's easier to find
someone who is already a "Zealot" and ask them to submit it for you.
The Open Directory (http://www.dmoz.org) is, unfortunately, the hardest to get
into - because it's run by an all-volunteer work force, there's no telling when
(or if) a submitted site will be reviewed. They ought to offer a low-cost paid
submission option and give the money to their volunteer editors... but they
don't.
Open Directory results affect your rankings on Google, AOL, and just about
everywhere else. It doesn't carry quite the weight of a Yahoo! listing, but it's
close.
All 3 of the major directories have rules on submitting your site. Since Yahoo!
and Looksmart both charge $299 just to look at your site, you had better make
sure your site is in tip-top condition before you submit, and you had better
follow all of the rules exactly.
My advice is to submit to any directory you can afford to be in. Yahoo! at $299
a year doesn't make sense for everyone, nor does Looksmart. The Open Directory
is free, so of course you'll want to submit to them.
Why I Never Submit To Search Engines! As for submitting to the search engines,
you know my position on this: work on getting links from other sites, and let
the search engines find you... unless you're ready to pay for inclusion.
I know you're itching to get your site listed, and won't believe me when I tell
you it's actually faster if you don't submit.
Here's a compromise: submit your home page to everyone except Google, then get
to work on incoming links. If you get even 20 links set up, I'll bet the
Googlebot finds you before the other search engines get around to visiting you.
Once you've been through this exercise, I doubt you'll ever submit a site again.
I wish you success...
Dan Thies is the author of "Search Engine Optimization Fast Start," a concise,
step-by-step guide to search engine positioning for the beginner to intermediate
level webmaster - available now at http://www.cannedbooks.com
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