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Submitting Your Site to Search Engines -- the Good the Bad and the Ugly

Is repeatedly submitting your site to all the major search engines a "best practice"? Absolutely not. Should you submit your site anywhere? Yes, to the Yahoo! Directory, the Open Directory project (aka DMOZ.com), and key vertical directories in your topic area. That's all you need. Launch your new site with good content, accessible webpage HTML coding, and links from highly credible sites. Google, MSN and Yahoo will find it.

Note: Submitting your site to the search engines has nothing to do with ranking. Resubmitting your site will not help your rankings whatsoever. The engines frown on extra processing load; they're pretty busy already capturing all the world's information.

Good submissions

Submit your site to the Yahoo! Directory. It’s the best $299 per year you’ll ever spend if you are serious about SEO for your site. Sure, few people actually use it, but the Yahoo Directory remains a credible reference source for search engines when they evaluate sites, because those accepted have been evaluated by human editors. The Open Directory Project (www.dmoz.org) is also good, but lately many categories lack editors and those still functioning are overwhelmed.

Bad submissions

Repeated submission to major search engines -- most likely done by something automated -- doesn’t work. The engines block auto submissions by requiring you to write in a code from a graphic that no machine can read. See http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl to see how this works. If you’re paying someone to do this for you, you’re giving your money away for nothing. Instead, do it yourself and give your coins to a group like World Vision to aid disaster victims.

Ugly Submissions

Did you ever read, "We’ll submit your site to 100+ or 1000+ search engines"? Don’t. There are nowhere near that many search engines and never have been. Most are likely to be links farms, long discredited by search engines and reputable search engine optimization firms. Participating in them is worse than worthless, since you could be penalized for being in a bad links neighborhood.