The incubator that we work in, has a bunch of small businesses, with varying degrees of proficiency with the web. Every so often, we run a seminar for them on building web presence. One of the questions that is likely to come up at the end, will be about search engine submission. Our neighbouring businesses get emails with offers like this:
History and the Current Era
A long, long time ago, I submitted sites to search engines. I’m talking about 1994-1996. By 1997, the web was becoming decently interlinked. That linking of sites into a formed web, is what allows Google and the modern generation of search engines to work. The old stuff, like AltaVista, HotBot and Lycos, which in their early days relied a lot on submitted sites, has both evolved and disappeared in the face of the modern, link following search engine.
How do the modern search engines decide to rank your site? Strictly, no-one outside the search engines knows all the details. But observation, testing and reading what the search engines themselves claim, shows that search engines like sites with links to them – not just any links, but links that are formed for a good reason, that a user might feel was a good reason for visiting the link. I’m not going to discuss that much more in this article, just this whole idea of search engine submission.
The key points are that modern search engines, like Google and Bing, follow the links around the net, and use those links to find and rank sites. If your site is so poorly linked to, that it hasn’t been found, how high in the ranking will you appear, after submitting your site? The answer is “on competitive keywords, not very far – and on uncompetitive keywords, you may do quite well, but are those valuable enough to try to get?”
By and large, you are better off making sure you’ve joined relevant trade associations with member directories, joined LinkedIn and mentioned your site and formed relationships with business colleagues, or even joined appropriate discussion forums and linked to relevant and useful comment on your web site – these are all more valuable uses of your time and money than submitting your site to Google or Bing.
You do have to watch out for who’s linking to you. Some “neighbourhoods” can reduce the trust that Google extends to you. I can’t tell you what precise directories and link farms might be involved in automated submission, but I’d tend to be very suspicious about the value of those links. By and large, anything formed from automation, will also tend to have a lot of spammy content – and you don’t want that, pointing to your site. Spammy stuff won’t add link weight and trust.
As a small business looking to promote yourself on the web, be very cautious about following up on the offers you get in your email, and instead of spending time on those, go find someone in a discussion forum with a problem of the type that your business solves, and help them – especially if they have a problem that you can answer in a longer article, or a YouTube video, on your blog, explaining the options and how to use what you recommend. Takes about the same amount of time, costs about the same or less, and is likely to result in the search engines both visiting, and better ranking, your site than just “submitting”. And you may have helped someone who becomes a client, or at least thinks more favourably of you.
There’s a guy at Google, called “Matt Cutts”, who’s really helpful, especially to learners. Read a nice interview with Matt Cutts, with a side salad on search engine submission. And another, older message about the official looking requests for money in order to have your site submitted.
