The Truth About Search Engine Submission Services

You see, I'd rather not sell you something than to sell you something and have you be disappointed. The purpose of this article is to give you a realistic idea of the kind of results you can expect from a submission service—whether you buy the service here or from another company.

Don't get me wrong, the submission service can definitely help, but it's not a miracle and it's not instant web popularity. You still need to optimize your website and build links to it.

Getting your site indexed is also something you could easily do yourself.

How a Submission Service Works

The major search engines are special because the overwhelming majority of your search engine derived traffic will come from the top 4 or 5 search engines—and most of that will come from Google. Submitting to them must be done manually because most reject automated submissions.

I do use software to submit web sites to the minor search engines, niche search engines, and minor directories—but I always submit sites to the major search engines manually.

Services that offer to submit your site to a large numbers of search engines most likely use submission software too, but they may not submit your site to the major search engines manually. That's a crucial point.

If you have a couple hundred dollars for the software and are willing to pay the database update fees, and if you know the search engine rules and optimization, you could submit your own site and offer this same service. If not, you might be wise to trust it to someone who does.

Whether you hire me for your search engine submissions or someone else you trust is not the important point. The important point is that you do not get taken in by false promises and dubious practices.

No Guarantees

That's gotten better at the major search engines, but it can still take months at the smaller engines. Also, submitting a site does not guarantee it will be included any more than site optimization attempts guarantee a high ranking.

Artificial Link Popularity

Regularly Scheduled Resubmissions

If your site is indexed, the search engine spiders come around regularly to check for changes and new content anyway. The more updates you make and the more content you add, the more often they tend to come around. So there just is no need to resubmit on an artificial timetable.

If someone were trying to sell me a resubmission service I would consider it attempted robbery. OK, not really, but you get the point. It's about as useful as lipstick on a fish!

Volume Hype

Enough trickles do add up to a small traffic stream, but it's not like you'll get thousands of visitors instantly. That's what they want you to think, but it just isn't so.

The most valuable part of my submission and analysis service is the site analysis, not the submissions. After all, what good is it to submit your site everywhere if it's not optimized for good placement? Just being in the search engine's databases doesn't do a lot of good if your site is found deeper than searchers travel through the search results.

FFA Pages

Automated submission software ensures that FFA pages are swamped with links. You'd be lucky if an FFA link lasts more than a few hours.

They will bring you a lot of spam if you like that, because most FFA page owners offer them so they can email a quick thank you and then launch into a sales pitch for something or other. This is called reverse marketing, and FFA reverse marketing doesn't work very well either, in case you're thinking of trying it. Don't waste your time and money, it's a suckers game.

Guaranteed Placement

If your site is penalized or banned you're worse off than when you started. It's hard to get back into the search engine, and even harder to get a good ranking once your site has a strike against it. Think in the long term, and do not participate in illegal techniques or practices.

Guaranteed placement usually means one of three things.

1. The keywords you get a top placement for are so obscure you'd have gotten them anyway, but they are also so obscure they won't bring you any traffic.
2. They buy an advertising spot for your site, take a screen capture of your placement, then pull the advertising. If needed, they can produce the screen capture and are legally off the hook unless you have a written agreement that the top results are for organic search results, not paid placement.
3. They are completely unethical and ignore your refund requests once they have your money.

How much time is needed? As long as it takes!

If you do buy into that, make sure:

• You get it in writing.
• It's for keywords that receive an adequate volume of searches each month.
• There's a deadline so they can't string you along forever and then void the guarantee because you tire of the monthly payments.

Are All Submission Services Bad?

In Conclusion