Why are web development and search engine optimization companies still offering ‘Search Engine Submission Services’? Sites (pages, actually) get into the search engines when their automated ‘bots’ find their pages through links on sites that are already in the search engines.
Per Google – http://www.google.com/addurl/ – “We add and update new sites to our index each time we crawl the web, and we invite you to submit your URL here. We do not add all submitted URLs to our index, and we cannot make any predictions or guarantees about when or if they will appear. “ So you can submit it, but it doesn’t mean it’s going to show in the listings any quicker than if you got a few good links into the site straight away, which would be better for your results anyway.
You can submit sites to web directories — and this can be a good way to getting links on the web for search engines to then find you. I don’t recommend paying for a submission unless it is a well known site with a lot of traffic or highly regarded and seen as necessary for your specific industry. I do recommend to my clients that they pay for a listing in the Yahoo Directory ($299/year) for at least the first year. The Yahoo directory used to bring a lot of traffic into my sites, but since they now feature their own search engine, the directory isn’t used as much — but Google still picks up those links and seesm to give them fairly good weight.
Perhaps these web dev companies are promoting this service because the clients are not as up to date on the industry (why would they be?) and keep asking for this service. I have one client that kept saying, “Have you submitted my site to search engines?” and I kept reminding him that it wasn’t necessary.
A little bit of information can be a dangerous thing.
