Snake Oil Submission Companies
How many times have you seen this approach?
- Automatically submit your site to 1000+ search engines!!!
- Automatically submit your site to 3000+ search engines!!!
- Automatically submit your site to 10 Million search engines!!!
Can you guess the common misnomers in the above claims made by some submission companies?
- There aren’t 1000 decent search engines to submit to.
- You cannot auto-submit to all the search engines.
Many (of the best ones) require manually choosing a main category, then digging deeper into sub-categories before submitting your site.
So how do submission companies claim to get you into so many indexes and directories? They are not completely wrong but not completely honest either.
If you submit your site to altavista.com, have you done one submission, or 21? Both could be the ‘honest’ answer. Altavista’s direct network of national and language specific sites now totals 21 engines worldwide. They may also sell result data to other engines, so the total could be many times higher. Once indexed by Altavista your data is accessible by all these individual engines, so you decide. Has your site been submitted to 1 or 21 engines?
How about Looksmart and Yahoo?
Yahoo is the easier answer. To get into their directory you have to submit manually, but they draw their search engine results from Google. Google also supplies data to other engines, so a page indexed there will get you listed everywhere they supply data, but again, their submission process is manual not automatic. Looksmart is at present charging you to get listed, so no one can truly guarantee you a listing for your site without paying a fee.
Should you believe the company which claims submission to 1000 search engines? It depends. How many bottles of snake oil would you like?