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Is it ever worth pulling out the credit card and paying for submission directly to a SE? (No middlemen!)
Here's how the picture looks as of about two months ago
Major Search Engines & Results Providers [webmasterworld.com]
Google has no paid submit. They've got free submit but even if you don't, if you've got inbound links they'll find you anyway. Yahoo has free submit and also finds through links, but their paid submission has a PPC element involved. For search that's about it, except for Teoma/Ask and I believe there's been some discussion lately about whether or not to pay in that forum here.
If you get links from pages already in yahoo, you'll likely end up in yahoo for free, just as you would from having links from people that googlebot already visits on a regular basis.
At least, it's been working just fine that way for the lil' not for profit organization site I pamper.
[edited by: kevinpate at 6:10 pm (utc) on June 12, 2004]
This is yahoo uk, non commercial sites are still free.
Bek.
About free crawler based submissions, see...
[webmasterworld.com...]
This may be an oversimplification, but generally I'd say that if you don't have enough inbound links for the engines to find you, you don't have enough to rank competitively. In other words, submission to crawler based engines is probably pointless.
PFI (pay for inclusion), is, I feel, basically a corrupt business model. If it were called pay for frequent indexing, that would be a fairer representation of why you might want to consider it. Yahoo/Overture has a PFI program (which is also PPC) called Site Match, which for the reason above, is not worth the money unless you have very rapidly changing pages, like seasonal retail specials, that you want to get indexed quickly and don't mind paying. It gets you into the Yahoo index and spidered frequently... nothing more.
There are also paid XML feeds, which are for very large sites.
About Yahoo directory, take a look at...
[webmasterworld.com...]
My feeling is that if you aren't going to get drill-down traffic in yahoo, you are buying PageRank and accepting the liability of a yahoo title in the serps.
There aren't any other engines worth considering for paid inclusion. DMOZ is free and definitely worth the effort to study the categories carefully before you submit.
Okay, now I'm confused. Are you saying that I don't need to submit a new site to Y, G, and DMOZ?
I thought that was mandatory for new sites.
I submit to DMOZ, Google, and Yahoo/Yahoo Directory. Don't really care about anyone else.
Are you saying that I don't need to submit a new site to Y, G, and DMOZ?
DMOZ is not a search engine, it's a directory. Always worth submitting your site there. Read the guidelines carefully, choose the right cat. Look at the cat to get the overall flavour of the editors writing "style" and submit and forget.
You do not need to submit to Yahoo or Google (which are search engines which crawl the web automatically) if you have sufficient links to your site from other sites in those indexes. The crawlers will find you automatically by following those links.
Google is faster than Yahoo at this. Yahoo want you to pay for inclusion.
For Yahoo, you either wait, or you pay.
You can submit to google, but frankly I've never bothered - I just go get a few inbound links and let the crawler do its job.
TJ
How the heck is a brand spankin' new site supposed to have the incoming links, G will use to find it?
That is the weakness in G's design. Recently, I put up another site--the first site on the Net to focus exclusively on a hot issue. Within weeks I was on Y's first page of search results for the most important key search phrase. While we're still on G's 4th page because of a lack of incoming links.
[edited by: Lokutus at 2:11 pm (utc) on June 16, 2004]
How the heck is a brand spankin' new site supposed to have the incoming links, G will use to find it?
I usually find a few existing sites in that area drop them a line and ask.
If you've built a good site, and they're not a direct competitor they will link to it.
ODP is free, read the guidelines, make certain of the right category and check how other listings look for an idea how to write the title and description.
Neither one is guaranteed and can take a while but it's definitely worth doing. Also, a non-commercial site can be submitted to Zeal.
Submit the homepage to Google & Yahoo free submit and then forget about it. They'll get to you.
We are also thinking about signing the site up as an Amazon affiliate for book sales. (We might earn an entire $1 per year that way!)
Nothing else would be sold on the site.
And if the site is not in G and Y because it's waiting for some good samaritans to link to it eventually, just how will these samaritans find it in the first place if it's not already in G and Y?
(I did note the advice to ask other websites directly. So the lesson is to be proactive and not sit on your butt waiting for g 7 Y to find you.)
[edited by: Lokutus at 3:55 pm (utc) on June 16, 2004]
How the heck is a brand spankin' new site supposed to have the incoming links, G will use to find it?
Lokutus - I suggest you have a look through the Link Development forum here - you'll find lots of options and advice there.
As per my above post, generally you write to other webmasters and ask for a link.
You can get into google without any inbound links, but there's little point. You need the inbound links to be ranked anywhere in google, and without any, google will only spider a tiny fraction of your site, possibly homepage only.
You need inbound links.
TJ
As a website designer, I often feature new clients' sites on my home page, and then link to them from my portfolio pages later on.
This usually helps them get indexed and gets the ball rolling while waiting for DMOZ, Y! and other links to materialize.
Okay, now I'm confused. Are you saying that I don't need to submit a new site to Y, G, and DMOZ?I thought that was mandatory for new sites.
You should evaluate directories and submit to those that will help you. Think of directory listings as providing inbound links to your site. Inbound links are what you need to rank, and they bring in direct traffic as well. That's one reason you want to have good content... so your site is worth linking to.
Until people can find you though, you're going to have to find them and ask for the links. The whole business of getting links is not very different than in the world off the Web, trying to get clients and references.
As has been pointed out in numerous ways, there's no point submitting to crawler-based engines. If they can't find you, you won't rank anyway. Yahoo has both a directory and a search engine. There are tradeoffs in being listed in the Yahoo directory. I suggest that you read the threads that have been referenced for you.
Note, by the way, that in the forum list on WebmasterWorld, the following forum...
Deprecated - Search Engine Submission
Submitting used to be more important than it is, though I think it's been overrated for several years now.
