Search Engine Submissions
In the last few days I’ve come across a number of Northern Ireland and Belfast internet companies that are offering to submit to the ‘top 10 search engines’ or ‘to over 400+ search engines every month’ as an SEO service. These companies should know better. If you’re on the look out for a web site for your business and you’re promised this or you see it in their company literature then take note!
Outside Google and the other 3 major search engines (Ask, Yahoo & MSN) these other search engines are pretty much worthless. Submission to 10 or 400+ search engines is a nonsense, and monthly submissions is pointless.
Most web design companies won’t even submit your website to Google manually, they’ll simply get it indexed by obtaining a few links on other popular websites that are regularly visited by Google’s spiders. The link to your site will be picked up and visited by Google and your site will be added to Google’s listings.
Talk of monthly submissions again is nonsense and old hat.
Avoid these types of search engine submission offers, and query the companies that offer them. Certainly don’t make these extra offers the deal maker!
May 15th, 2008 at 12:21 pm
I came across something similar, but not quite as dumb as this. An agency that I’m consulting with insists on submitting the pages of a new site they’re building to the major search engines by hand. They claim that “there’s no harm”, and “they want to do everything they can to help the site get indexed faster”. They’re already submitting a sitemap, and the new pages will have solid links pointing to them. People just can’t get away from outdated SEO techniques.
May 15th, 2008 at 12:22 pm
That reminds me, yesterday I posted a new post on my blog and within 11 mins it appeared in Google’s index.
I don’t know what the record is, but that’s pretty cool if you ask me.
May 15th, 2008 at 4:26 pm
11 minutes is pretty quick.
By hand, does that mean the client picks up the submission bill?!
May 19th, 2008 at 12:15 pm
It’s a weird situation… The “client” in this scenario is another division of the company I work for. (I work mostly on the D2C side of things). But this division wants a branded web site built so they’ve contacted an agency to develop the site and do the SEO. Only problem is the agency doesn’t really know SEO that well. So I was brought into the project to act as a consultant to the agency.
So in a way, I’m really on the clients side, even though I’m working with the agency. In other words, the agency is utilizing my SEO skills for free, and charging my company for it. Messed up, eh.
But to answer your question. Yes, hand submitting the new web site is part of their “SEO Package” that they’re charging for. If I prohibited them from doing it, it wouldn’t change the price anyway.