Step 3: Website Submission

Lesson (18): Search Engines' Submission Rules and Guidelines
Lesson (19): Submitting to Search Engines
Lesson (20): Creating a Search Engine Friendly Sitemap
Lesson (21): Submitting to Directories
Lesson (22): Verifying Submission Success
Demo (3): Website Submission
Selected Reading List
Quiz (4): Website Submission

Step 3: Website Submission
Search Engine Submission is a term that is sometimes defined as getting a website listed in a search engine. Nowadays, submission is even less than that – it's just an application to include your site in a search engine index. This application may or may not be accepted by the search engine.

Let's imagine that submission alone gets you into the search engine index and you're now listed – this means that your site is found in the result list for every word or word combination that is on your page. You should understand that this is really of little consequence. Submission alone will not get you a high ranking on particular terms. It simply means that the search engine knows that your pages exist.

We've said it before throughout this course and it bears repeating again: search engines find new websites and pages by following links. In fact, submitting a new site will not get it listed. If you don't have links pointing to your site, search engines will ignore it.

Google occasionally crawls websites that have been submitted and queued, but it doesn't necessarily mean a listing. It all depends on whether you've got links pointing to your site from other domains. Therefore, submit your site to search engines if you want to, but it's not necessary – you're better off looking for links.

In some cases, however, submitting to Google and other search engines makes sense. After you update pages (for instance, after another optimization cycle) or add new pages to a site which is already listed, your submission can sometimes speed up the listing process. This is not always the case, and often it will only get you listed a day earlier, but in other cases it can really help.
How many engines are there that I really need to submit to?
We would like to warn you about submission services that promise to submit your site automatically to thousands of search services. There are, actually, only a few dozen major search engines which are really used by customers and which are potential traffic sources for your business. And when you remember that most of them pull the result data from a common data provider, you will see that the promise to submit to thousands of search engines looks, at a minimum, odd.

Most often, the "search engines" to which these services submit you are the so-called "Free For All" link pages offering low value for your site.
How many pages of my site should be submitted?
We recommend that you only submit your site after you've brought significant changes to your pages that may modify a spider's "opinion" about your site. Submit your pages after you've made additions to page content or added new pages. In the second situation, submit only the page that has been added. If you have made changes to several pages, submit only those changes. Be careful to not exceed the submission limit some engines set for daily submissions. If you have four pages to submit to a search engine and it says it will accept only two per day, it's better to schedule the other two for the next day.

If your aim is just to get listed, make sure your link structure will allow a search spider to find all your pages through links (probably through a site map) and then submit only your home page.
Is resubmission useful?
Resubmission is neither useful nor harmful for your site. It will not help if your rankings slip downwards. In the majority of cases, it will also not help if your pages disappear from the search engine's list (which would be unusual in any case and would only happen during the update of the search engine's database).

In the past, resubmitting a site that was already listed in a search engine could hurt your rankings. For example, Inktomi went through a period where they penalized every site that was resubmitted to them. This was because the majority of submissions were spam. To save them the trouble of weeding out good sites from bad, they just penalized all of them.

AltaVista also went through a period where they would remove any site submitted to them. This was possible because they assumed that a submitted site had changed so they'd remove it until they had time to recrawl it.

These days, resubmission is a complete waste of time and only makes some sense when the page you resubmit has undergone major changes.
What you should remember from here:
Search engine submission is no more than a simple application to include your site in a search engine's index, and the submission may or may not be considered by the search engine.
Don't waste time submitting pages of your site you don't need to submit. Focus on those added or significantly updated.
Resubmission doesn't get your site banned but resubmitting more than once a year is pointless for almost all search engines.