In my quest to understand SEO (as mentioned in my previous post - btw, this is not a continuation of the last post, it’s just a rant about a similar topic), I learned the hard way how NOT to submit my website to the right search engines. As I read more and more about how important adding my URL to various Search Engines is to the general traffic of a website, I quickly found sites that specialized in such tasks. They promised to submit my URL to various search engines if I placed their link somewhere on my website. Some of them were great. However, several sites promised something that I didn’t really think about at the time. They promised to submit my website to 100,000 or more search engines. Since it was free, and since I felt like the other sites were delivering as promised, I entered my information in their form. That was a big mistake. Instead of the usual, thank you for submitting your URL with us… I got lots and lots of spam. At the time, I had no clue as to what FFA meant, but I was getting tired of the spam mail I was getting. Of course, they all claimed to be ICANN-Spam compliant and so they weren’t really spammers. But I feel like like they are worse (even if they include the opt-out link in the email, though not always). So I researched a bit more and learned something from my mistake…
Are there thousands of search engines? Some people promise to submit your website to 50,000 or even 100,000 search engines. There aren’t thousands of search engines on the Internet. The majority of these so called “search engines” are known mostly as Free For All (FFA) link pages or special interest web pages. Do not make the mistake like me. Submitting your webpage to thousands of FFA sites means that you’ll end up with thousands of spam email messages. In addition, this will hurt your ranking in many search engines (since you will be labeled as a SPAMMER). Learn from me…
There’s only a handful of search engines that can really bring visitors to your website. You should concentrate on the important search engines when you submit your website to search engines. For now, there are four major sites: Google, Yahoo, MSN Search and Ask.com. They are responsible for the bigger part of the search engine traffic you can get because they also power other search engines, for example the search engine on AOL.com displays Google results while AltaVista uses Yahoo. So remember, concentrate on these 4 major search engines and forget about all other sites since most people all over the world choose one of these over any other.
Come back to read more about this topic later on…