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Google: indexes entire site. Only need to submit your root index page and it will crawl the entire site. Programmed submission - useless.
Altavista: using a new "ransom note" submission method. Programmed solutions not usable and attempts at programmed submission may get your site banned.
WiseNut: mainly uses seed directories such as Yahoo and the ODP. They also crawl the entire site based on the index page. Programmed submission not needed.
NorthernLight: indexing is spotty at best, however they also will eventually crawl an entire site taking the choice index pages. Programmed submission usable, but not effective.
HotBot: current evidence suggests that new submissions are all-but-thrown out of the ink db. programmed submission very risky.
Fast/AllTheWeb/Lycos: also an effective full site crawler based on index page. Programmed submissions usable, but not needed.
Excite/Webcrawler: has all but closed the doors.
Teoma: cherry picks directory listings (looksmart,odp,yahoo). programmed submission, not needed.
Direct Hit: submissions not directly linked to listings. They use external data from their partners for listings. Programmed submission possible, but not recommended (let them come to you).
The Rest: Specific topic engines may be worth your time. If they are, don't abuse their system with programmed submissions.
Directories: ODP, Yahoo, About, Looksmart. By their nature they are hand submits only. Programmed submissions are not effective and asking for potential trouble.
At this rate I will need to take a home course on accounting as SEO is taken over by SEM (search engine management)
It also makes you wonder what TD/WPG are going to be offering as surely they must be seeing there market vanishing, which is very apparent when you look at the current list of SE’s within WPG with 6PPC SE’s, ok they have the reporting aspects of the programs but these are now starting to be in doubt
How about a page on WMW with a link to the submit page for the big SEs and a bunch of special topics too? :) - with the latest WMW opinion about each one.
Opinions on this-- should we submit individual pages anyways? How often should we resubmit/etc?
I've been suspecting this for a while, and contemplating resubbing, but i'm in all, and the crawlers that i know will come, have, even though not fully listing all pages. It's a waiting gentleman's/lady's game. So i will keep on with modying and forget about subbing.
However, I have NEVER had Google index an entire site, even over a good amount of time - anyone else?
ps. Hopefully 'guys who submit to 100,000 search engines for $39.95 ' will now fall by the wayside as their 'submissions' bounce off many of the major engines!
There are some sites you have to manually submit to, either because (a) you have to pay (ie: yahoo), (b) it's worth the extra effort to craft a specific submission for them (ie: yahoo nonprofit sites), or (c) they don't accept autosubmission (ie: altavista).
For the rest, since a properly done autosubmission is exactly the same as a manual submission, it is merely a question of (1) does ANY submission do any good and (2) is the autosubmission susceptible to abuse [You can spam a search engine by hand, but it's easier to do it with a program].
I see no evidence that any search engines are actively discriminating against submissions based on auto vs. manual. Any discrimination is based on the submission pattern for a domain (shotgunning) or more cynically, by whether or not you've paid for inclusion. So submitting every once in a while can't really hurt. I look at it as an "I'm not dead, yet!" message to the search engine, just in case you got dropped because your site was unavailable the last time they looked.
Bottom line, the number of top-tier search engines are so few that you could do manual submits to them for a domain relatively easily. What a good autosubmission system is really useful for is getting listings in the 2nd tier and specialty indexes, the guys that might only get you a few hits a year. It is simply not worth manually submitting to these folks, but a good autosubmitter basically eliminates the repetitive typing, making it cost effective to submit.
Far more important than all the submitting, however, is making sure your site is clean, well designed, attractive to the search engines and your visitors (it isn't how many clicks you get, but how many sales you make that really counts). Good titles, meta tags, content. And spend time getting relevant sites to link to you, not obsessing over your ranking for particular searches on particular search engines.
Best,R
It seems to me that there are 2 kinds of submission:
1. To the SEs that you hope will provide a lot of traffic e.g. the top 10, certain directories specialising in your topic.
2. The Rest (OK we know about the 100,000 but its more like a 100 or so isn't it).
So, my question is: Is autosubmission valid for 'the rest'?
<a properly done autosubmission is exactly the same as a manual submission>
How do you know? I'm not technical but it would be great if a few experts could clear this one up. I would love to use autosubmission for all the small SEs but don't because of the things I read at WMW.
<no evidence that any search engines are actively discriminating against submissions based on auto vs. manual> Some say there is evidence, some say there isn't. Can we clear this up too?
<a properly done autosubmission is exactly the same as a manual submission>
How do you know?
A submission, whether it comes from a user on a browser, or a program, is just a HTTP request to the search engine server. All the server knows is "I got a request from this IP address with this information"
There are two types of autosubmitters, programs (running on your PC), and services (running on the service's server).
A search engine wishing to detect a service (such as mine) would notice that it was getting a lot of submissions for a lot of different websites from the same IP address or range (actually, I don't hide what I'm doing, I prominently flag my submissions as coming from selfpromotion.com in the user_agent field).
A search engine wishing to detect submission programs is going to look for a lot of submissions for the same website or page in a small period of time (ie: spamming gazillions of gateway pages).
Since a search engine, by definition, wants to know about new websites, but does not want to get spammed, they have no reason to block submission services (which, if implemented properly, don't spam, but do tell them about a lot of new websites), and every reason to take countermeasures against people who are trying to spam them -- whether they are using a submission program, a "bad" service, or doing it by hand. And in order to do this, they monitor excessive submissions by domain/ip address. The only reason they'd ban a submission source by its IP address is if it was consistently spamming them.
It seems to me that there are 2 kinds of submission:1. To the SEs that you hope will provide a lot of traffic e.g. the top 10, certain directories specialising in your topic.
2. The Rest (OK we know about the 100,000 but its more like a 100 or so isn't it).
So, my question is: Is autosubmission valid for 'the rest'?
It's more like 50 general purpose indexes, and thousands of very specialized ones. The bottom line is it isn't cost effective to manually submit to a site that might only get you 10 clicks a year, but autosubmission gives you the leverage (less typing) to make it worthwhile.
<no evidence that any search engines are actively discriminating against submissions based on auto vs. manual> Some say there is evidence, some say there isn't. Can we clear this up too?
It is impossible to say for sure what the big guys are doing now, or will be doing next tuesday, but AFAICT there doesn't seem to be any meaningful difference between auto and manual submission effectiveness for those majors that can be autosubmitted to.
As for the minors, while I've had a few that have asked me not to autosubmit (mostly they fear off-topic submissions, which I take some pains to try and filter out), there are others that I have talked to -- in particular sites that ask for a lot of information -- who appreciate properly checked automatic submissions, as they tend to be of higher quality, with no stupid errors like malformed urls.
Bottom line, I think most of them don't care how they get the submissions, they care about whether or not they are spam.
Dunno about that, but I do know that Google has crawled nearly 1,200 pages of my site (or about half the total pages) over the past three nights. The crawl started the same evening that Yahoo listed my site--which may be a coincidence, since other Webmasters have reported that Google's latest crawl started that day.
