Why is SES Depricated in WW?

Has it become an antiquated task?

[neophyte]

How do you submit a site to the major search engines? I've read that it's only necessary to subit to the largest ones (google, yahoo, Infoseek, etc), rather than "hundreds of search engines" as promoted by "pay to submit" companies.

I'd like to learn how to manually submit to these SEs - and only the ones that "really count".

But I'm confused by the "deprecated" status of the SES forum here. Does it mean that one no longer needs to submit a site to search engines? That you can just sit back and wait for the spiders to come?

If it IS still good practice to manually submit, I'd appreciate a link to a discussion within WW which will tell me how, and who, to submit a site to.

I've tried the site search here, but it doesn't seem to work anymore.

Thanks to all in advance,

Neophyte

[ken_b]

Many, if not most, people believe that submitting a site directly to a search engine is no longer effective.

What does work is getting links to your sites from other sites. The major SEs will find those links and follow them to your site and then index your site.

[jdMorgan]

Does it mean that one no longer needs to submit a site to search engines?

Yes.

That you can just sit back and wait for the spiders to come?

Yes.

One incoming link from any page that the search engine already knows about will do. And since you'll need more incoming links if you want your site to rank, you might as well work on that instead of "submitting." In most cases a site submitted without any "supporting" incoming links will quickly disappear anyway, so submission is pretty much a waste of time.

Jim

[Lord Majestic]

What is likely to be happening is this: there are far too many URLs in WWW Universe than search engines can or want to handle. I have not got stats at hand right now (will have good info later this year), but it appears that empirical view that search engines index fraction of the web is correct, and this does not take into account "hidden web" that is accessed via user queries or hidden behind firewalls.

So, we have situation where there are way too many URLs, what to do then? A logical answer is to set some priorities and set them higher to those URLs that have got pages pointing to them. We therefore we move to conclusion similar to that by jdMorgan -- getting incoming links will tell search engine that your page is important enough to get crawled, you don't need PR10 here, you just need to raise above the rest -- billions of links that nobody points to.

Its not so much knowing that you page is there, but knowing that its worthy to take very limited place in the primary index. A few pages per domain can qualify straight away, but it would make sense to avoid indexing lots of pages on site that nobody points to.

[neophyte]

Wow. Very interesting.

So, it's all about site A, B, C (and on, and on) linking to my site (for example)?

What about all this stuff I read about SEO, keyword "density" within page copy, etc?

Some of these SEO companies I've looked at on the web (outfits that do this for a living) charge a pretty penny for their service. Do these services simply (perhaps not "simply") do stuff to a site which bolsters a ranking already achieved via incoming site links?

[jdMorgan]

SEO's do lots of things, but your original post was about submitting your site.

Have you seen the classic "26 steps [webmasterworld.com]" thread -- almost all of it still applies, either to do your own tweaking or to select someone to do it for you. Even if you don't do it yourself, there are several more threads around here like that one that will help you avoid the charlatans.

Jim

[rogerd]

Neophyte, today's SE algorithms use both on-page and off-page criteria. Off page criteria like linkage and anchor text are important now. On-page criteria like the ones you mention (and many others) are important too, but probably won't be enough all by themselves.

[neophyte]

Thanks to you all for your insight into this issue. I've visited the 26 steps and ... boy ... there's a lot to consider.

Atleast I won't have to bother with actual site submission. For that, I'm grateful.

It does look as though, however, that I will have to try and outsource (subcontract) this "deeper" SEO stuff to someone else in order to try and satisfy the SE needs/desires of my clientele - I just don't have the time to do it...and/or do it correctly...from my little one-man-shop.

Is it inappropriate to ask for any referrals to SEO experts/companies which I may seek to outsource this part of a project to?

[hp11]

Is it inappropriate to ask for any referrals to SEO experts/companies which I may seek to outsource this part of a project to?

Not at all. But, some SEO professionals may not be able to give you some of their top SEO clients as a referral (even if it is their most successful work) because they signed an NDA (non-disclosure agreement) with them.

This is not always the case, but it does happen. I would still ask. I would also get some before and after stats and find out if and where this person posts and read some of the posts.

[neophyte]

Thanks for your response hp11.

Okay, then, if it's not a policy issue here at WW, then I would welcome any SEO experts reading this forum to sticky me with their email address so we can discuss the possibility of working together.

Neophyte

[decaff]

"What is likely to be happening is this: there are far too many URLs in WWW Universe than search engines can or want to handle. I have not got stats at hand right now (will have good info later this year), but it appears that empirical view that search engines index fraction of the web is correct, and this does not take into account "hidden web" that is accessed via user queries or hidden behind firewalls..."

Northern Light made the claim 2 years back that there was something in the order of 900 Billion web pages (if so then...must be well over a trillion now)...

So...there is far more volume then a search engine .... even the size of Google or MSN could ever index...

[Lord Majestic]

Northern Light made the claim 2 years back that there was something in the order of 900 Billion web pages (if so then...must be well over a trillion now)...

I am getting suprisingly few new unique URLs from pages that have been crawled -- I am talking here about diverse selection of a few hundred million pages here, and on average it seems 1 crawled page gives 8 new URLs, however as new pages will get crawled I expect to see few new URLs per page as more and more will point to already identified pages.