Broken promises: The pitfalls of most submission services
By Yelena Shapiro

Look for a "site submission service" on any search engine and you'll see thousands of companies offering submission services for free and for pay. Some services promise to submit your site to "over 6,000 search engines," while others claim they can get your site listed in such top directories as Yahoo! Beware of these promises! Many are nothing but an unsubstantiated sales pitch. If you've read our article Submitting to Directories you know no automatic submission service can get your site listed with Yahoo!

Automatic submission programs
Site submission programs can save webmasters lots of time by automating the submission process. Automatic programs do the same thing a human would do: They open a given search engine's "Submit URL" form, fill in your information, and submit it. Mechanized services perform this task for possibly thousands of sites a day. If everything goes well, a site using a submission program will be spidered by a search engine in two to seven weeks.

Life is not perfect
Automatic submission programs are not always effective. It's commonly known that URL submission programs often fail to submit a site as promised. Most search engine optimization specialists recommend that your most important pages are submitted manually.

Still, some services can be very valuable -- you just need to know how to avoid the major pitfalls. Here are some common "features" to avoid when shopping for a submission service:

Unrealistic promise:
"We submit your site to over 3,000 search engines and directories!"
Think you'll get more traffic if your site is listed in "more than 3,000 search engines?" Think again. The truth is, more than 95% of search-engine-generated traffic comes from the major search engines -- Yahoo!, Google, Lycos, Excite and about ten others. Little search engines don't accomplish much in terms of traffic, especially if they're not related to your site,

More importantly, if a submission service claims to submit your site to that many search engines it's probably just submitting to Free-For-All (FFA) sites. FFA sites are set up with the sole purpose of capturing the submitter's e-mail address while providing a temporary listing.

Traffic from FFA sites is rather scanty and definitely not targeted. Spam e-mail, however, will be abundant. If your site gets submitted to even 20 FFA sites you'll get at least 40 confirmation messages and hundreds of solicitations later.

The bottom line is, beware of any services that promise to submit your site to more than 40 - 50 search engines.


Unrealistic promise:
"We will submit your site to Yahoo! and LookSmart"
Submitting to directories is a complicated and tedious ordeal. You have to choose the most appropriate category, fill in a description and a title along with your contact information, and pay for business categories. Both Yahoo! and LookSmart require that sites submitting to their business categories pay for a review. Submission services that claim to submit to Yahoo! and LookSmart are lying.

Even if your site doesn't belong to a business category, you still shouldn't expect a service to get you into one of these directories. Once again, an automated program is not likely to be able to choose an appropriate category for your site and fill out submission forms. Be especially cautious if a given service doesn't even ask for your site's title, description and your contact info. We recommend that you always submit manually to directories, or hire an SEO professional.


Unrealistic promise:
"We can get your site ranked high by 20 major search engines"
A site submission service does just what its name implies -- it submits your site to search engines. But top rankings are difficult to achieve without first optimizing your site. Submission services do not optimize your site -- they just tell search engines to spider it. Any submission service that promises to top rankings for your site without optimizing it is lying.


Unrealistic promise:
"We will submit your whole site in just a day!"
The above claim, if true, is actually one of the most potentially damaging things a submission service can do. Search engines have limits on how many pages a day any site can submit, and these parameters change continuously. For example, Google accepts only five pages a day, AltaVista accepts one, and Excite accepts 50.

Sites that ignore page limits set by search engines can get banned for spam. This means services that submit your whole site at once are putting you at risk to be banned.


Unrealistic promise:
"We submit thousands of sites a day"
Some search engines disapprove of overly eager submission services, specifically those that submit more than 100,000 pages a day. If a search engine notices a service like this, it may ban it. In this case, any site submitted through this service will not get through. We suggest that you only use well-known, reputable services to submit your site or hire an SEO firm to do it for you.


Unrealistic promise:
"Search engines always accept our submissions"
Some search engines, such as Northern Light ans Altavista, discourage automatic submissions. Services claiming that all search engines accept their submissions are probably not keeping individual search engines' preferences in mind.


If you have pages to submit, we suggest that you do so manually or that you hire a reputable SEO firm to help you with strategic submissions.