When do you submit site to search engines?

[Porkchop]

Hi,

This forum is fantastic.

My question is this:
When is it appropriate to submit to the search engines? I know the obvious answer is when it is finished but I want to get it going now while I am still working on it.
It is already in altavista but not the others yet.

I guess the spider engines find it and will update it as I continue the building...right?

I will continue to update it continuously as I find links to trade with etc. so I will probably never be finished. Other than the link page the other pages "will be finished".
Once these other pages are finished could I submit then?

Thanks for your help!
Beverly

[korkus2000]

You really just need links unless you are paying to submit(PFI). Most engines will find your site. Ink and Ask take some time. Google and Fast just need a link from a site in the index. Get a couple of links. I would wait to submit to DMOZ and Yahoo until it can stand as a valuable site in your theme.

[DaveN]

submit your site when you feel comfortable that the end-user experience will do your business justice, some sites are never finished in fact the Best sites aren't they are constantly being updated like WebmasterWorld there is always something new happening or book review sites where a new book is added daily.

just don't have loads of under construction pages everywhere the last thing you need is your unfinished site to look like a unfinished site if that makes sense

DaveN

[Oaf357]

Welcome to Webmaster World, Porkchop!

You can go either way. Get links from other sites (already indexed by search engines you want into) and your site will be found. You can also submit to the sites you want into. Either way takes time though. The key thing to remember is patience.

[biblo]

Hi all,

Unless you are willing to pay for submission, it's usually a good 2 to 3 months before it is in Google's systems.

I'd definitely recommend that once you've got your homepage done, plan out how long your site is going to be ready. Then within 2 months of completion, start submitting it to search engines. Might sound a little risky if your site is still very premature, but once you've got the structure of your site sorted out, it shouldn't pose a problem.

I'm not sure about getting links from other sites (re: oaf357's post). I was reading another section of the forum that was talking about page ranks and how page ranking drops if you link to external pages. Any ideas on how to balance getting yourself promoted but retain a substantial rank? (without cloaking ^_^)

[Oaf357]

Welcome to Webmaster World, biblo!

PR is a mere factor of Google rankings. Eliminating external links isn't necessarily a good idea. Centralizing them to a certain extent helps but the WWW wasn't built on sites that didn't link to each other.