Forum Moderators: phranque
*If* your site is worth linking to, ask some related sites to link to yours. It'll help if you've already linked to such sites yourself, but don't make your link to them contingent on whether they link back.
If your site *isn't* worth linking to, then improve your site before you go asking for links.
Submitting your site to search engines is useless
Total disinformation.
Google, and other search engines often have a facility for submitting URLs. Google encourages webmasters to submit the URLs of ALL their pages. Personally I advise submitting the URL of the main (home) page and then submitting a sitemap as per Google's advice. This does cause (Google at least) to index and list your pages irrespective of whether or not they are linked to by other sites.
Matt
Total disinformation.
We disagree, then. Just because Google has a facility for submitting sites doesn't mean it's USEFUL. The engines find sites whether you submit them manually or not, so submission is a waste of time. I've *never* submitted my sites to the search engines and I would guess that most people in this forum would be happy to get as much SE traffic as I do.
If your site is not indexed yet after 2 weeks of domain registration, you can try my trick that works all the time:
I registered a few domains 3 weeks ago. I had all of them up and running with an index page as I was still constructing those sites. To do an experiment, I submitted one of them to web directories that allows URL submission (i.e. either reciprocal or non-reciprocal kind of link).
2 weeks later, i.e. after I had my site up and running, I googled for my site and it is in the first page of Google search result i.e. "Results 1 - 10 of about 193,000 for "my site keyword."
If you are like me who is lazy to create Google sitemap, then the trick you should learn is to find web directories that is often crawled by Googlebot. Submit your sites there and you will be surprised to see how fast Google could index your web site.
This is not the first experiment that I did and I found that this trick works all the time. As for the other sites that I registered at the same time and did not submit them to the directory (or exchange link with others), they are nowhere to be found in Google yet. And they all are hosted on same server.
P.s. make sure you exchange links with sites with no "<META NAME="Googlebot" CONTENT="nofollow">" in their meta tag. If not, your link will not be followed by Googlebot.
Fastest way of getting indexed is to submit your site to Google site map plus do as what I said above.
[edited by: Mistra at 1:07 pm (utc) on Dec. 4, 2006]