Is search engine submission a waste of time?

[Roman]

Spending your time submitting your site to the search engines is a complete waste of time. Getting a new website listed in the search engines is much more about knowing how the search engines work than anything else. Search engines seek fresh, frequently updated content. When they visit these "fresh" sites, they follow links from these sites. Once they follow a link, if it is a link they've not followed before, they index that new site. Once you're indexed, you're listed! So a far more effective, faster, and reliable way to get a new site listed in the search engines is to get links to your new site from the "fresh" sites.

Two hints:

1. Press Release sites are constantly updated with new releases. Some of them allow anyone to submit a press release for free. Find these, write a release that includes a link to your site, and you're on your way.

2. Blogging sites are also very frequently updated, and the search engines love them. So, start a blog, find a good blogging directory, and submit your blog to that directory. Then write about and link to your new site. Using these and other techniques you can now consistently get new web sites listed in the major search engines in under a week. That's about as good as it gets!

[SpaceBOT]

That's absolutely right. I don't think bulk-submissions are any good anymore. They used to be when people were searching many different search engines and there were no clear dominant players out there.

But nowadays, 80% of your search engine traffic would probably come from Google and another 15% from MSN and the rest from Yahoo! (Yahoo is dying and not really worth SEOing for).

So, the best is to hand submit your site to very niche directories that would actually get you real traffic that converts into customers. There are many niche directories or resources out there that pertain to your specific products or industries that could definitely get you good quality traffic.

[trainsem]

All good points. I'll add that newbies can confuse inclusion with indexing with ranking. An XML sitemap will get you included and sooner or later you will be indexed. Ranking depends on the secret sauce and the relevance of a page to a search term compared to all the other pages vying for that term.

Submission to a major SE is unnecessary but it may make the site owner feel better.

[SpaceBOT]

Originally Posted by trainsem

Submission to a major SE is unnecessary but it may make the site owner feel better.

And search engine submission software vendors or service providers richer!

I must add that hand submitting to relevant directories is still worth the effort as they get you targeted traffic (although very little of it). But some local search engines may get you more traffic than google so don't discount the whole idea, just not bulk submissions.

[seogirl]

Do you have any suggestions for what the best press release submission services and blogging directories are?

There are so many free article directories out there too. Do you think it is worth the time and energy to sumbit to several of these types of directories? Or, are there a few of the free article directories that are "the best"?

[trainsem]

Not an easy question to answer. We know from Matt Cutts' blog that a press release won't help with ranking, so it is probably not worth the $500 level "optimised" submission. Not having tried it, I cannot be sure.

But it is worth the few eyeballs and the potential printed exposure you could get if there is a genuine story there. To do this, the approx $80 service from PRWeb is good because it increases the number of subscribers that get your release.

When I launched my hobby site for the Zune, I used the above paid service and 19 others. A couple charged something trivial like $1.50 but the rest were free. IIRC, I may have recrafted it 2-3 times across these sites to avoid too much duplication.

If considering the impact of dupe content, then note that PRWeb has a built-in 2 day delay (from memory) for the cheaper price, so use the other free services after the PR web has propagated.

That took me briefly into the Alexa 30,000 region and it felt good (although we know that the number is very flaky and means little). Now it is sitting in the 600,000 region.

PRWeb's stats made it look like tens of thousands of "people" received it - whether humans actually opened it long enough to read it is unknown. If you check the backlinks today, you will be lucky to find a couple that reference the press release. But in the weeks immediately following the release, many sites showed up as backlinks.

Therefore, a press release should be considered part of the marketing strategy, not purely for backlink value.

[trainsem]

Articles - I have submitted a reworked version of my Top 10 Tips for Google Ranking article to one or two sites just to measure the impact. I don't see any benefit to my site. The whole concept smells of dupe content so I am not planning to expend a lot of energy on article submissions.

[seogirl]

I think one of the problems with article submissions is that there is so much junk on the free article sites. I was looking for articles on a particular topic last week for a research project, and I decided it might be easier to dig through a free article directory than do a Google search.

Never again. There were a lot of articles, but you would have to be knowledgeable on the subject already to know which ones had any validity. There were articles with glaring factual errors, as well as articles with terrible grammar! Subject-verb agreement problems were everywhere.

[imroanne]

If we're talking about submitting our sites to search engines, then it's really a waste of time. Just take your time for your site to be crawled by Search Engines. I think it'll help you more on SE rankings since your site is indexed naturally, without any push or request to them per se.