Do you submit sites linking to you to search engines?

It might be a good idea

[Nick Jachelson]

I'm a little frustrated about how slow the major search engines are to find my inbound links (Google especially). In fact, in a bizzare twist, it lists a site that no longer links to me, while completely ignoring the 20 or so that do.

So I have started submitting those sites with links to mine to search engines in the hope that they would spider them sooner. Sure, I realize that they will eventually be respidered, but that may be a year from now! If a site that hasn't been updated for years, I don't think the bots are in any hurry to spider it again. Even if it added my link.

Is this a good idea or am I wasting my time?

[neuron]

if a tree falls in the forest and there's no one around to hear it, does it make any noise?

If you have links to your site and the search engines don't know about about them, do they help?

Rather than submit them to the search engines, try linking to them. For starters, you should try to get links from sites that are cached by google already.

If you get links from pages that are not in the google cache, you may want to try linking to those pages from a page that gets spidered frequently by google. These don't have to be permanent links, just link to the pages that are linking to you enough to get them noticed (indexed), then
you can remove the links, or just link to them occasionally, to share the link space with other pages you might want to call the SE's attention to.

[sugarrae]

>>>to find my inbound links (Google especially).

They find them just fine. They just only show a small sampling of your backlinks when you use the link command. It is not uncommon for a site with thousands of backlinks to only show a handful on a google link search. They know about them, even if they aren't giving you proof that they do.

Stop obsessing over the SE's finding your links. Just keep getting yourself traffic. Everything else will fall into place.

And by traffic, I mean real traffic, not search engine traffic.

[mister charlie]

the "right" links will not only bring the search engines, but they will bring visitors as well.

getting links (and visitors) from relevant sites will help insulate you from the ups and downs of the SERPs.

[pageoneresults]

To get a better idea of what Google might be seeing in regards to links to your site, try this query instead...

"www.example.com"