trebor - 1:52 pm on Jan 25, 2002 (gmt 0)

As someone who runs one of the more popular autosubmitters, let me put in my own 2 cents.

The benefits of autosubmission are:

1) Saves you time, you fill out the form once.

Your time is a cost. If your time costs $25 an hour, and using an autosubmitter saves you an hour a year, that is a worthy saving.

2) Does error checking on your input (at least, mine does!)

"Oops.. Typo in your url. Oh well, guess you won't get indexed until you notice and resubmit."

3) Makes it easy to do reminder ("I'm not dead yet") resubmissions every so often.

Your ISP brainfarted when Google came over to check on you. Resubmitting every couple of months might get you back in a few weeks faster.

4) Makes it cost effective to submit to the 2nd-tier indexes . Here I'm talking about the guys below the top 10. Maybe 40-60 of them. All told you might get 100-1000 clicks a year from all of these guys combined. If you had to submit to 50 of them at 10 minutes per, that's over 8 hours = $200 = not worth it. If you can do it in an hour, that's $25. Say you get 250 clicks a year, that's 10 cents a click. Now it's worth it.

To put it simply, if you're hammering a few nails, a hammer is fine. If you're hammering a lot of nails, you get a nail gun. A submission tool is a nail gun for urls.

That said, a submission SERVICE is more than just a submission tool. A good service helps its users prepare their pages for search engine listings -- and for the visitors that the listings will generate.

In fact, the educational aspects are the most important element.

Best
R