Are Search Engine Submission Services Worth It?

[Chris]

We’ve all noticed ads for businesses offering search engine submission services. Most of these companies boast that they will submit your site to “thousands of search engines”, while guaranteeing an effective SERP listing.

A simple search of Google using the keywords “search engine submission services” yields 3.3 million results, while Google’s SERP ad space is filled to the brim with ads from companies offering their submission and guaranteed ranking services. While many of these services and promises sound enticing, are they worth the time or money it would take to use them? The quick answer is NO. The long answer: still no, but with a better explanation. :)

Being a self-professed SEO noob, I am still learning what is good and what isn’t when it comes to the SEM/SEO industry. However, in my limited exposure, I have not read where any of the recognized industry experts suggest using these services. In fact, search engine submission is a moot point as it is. Jill Whalen of HighRankings.com explains this thought:

“(Y)ou absolutely do NOT need to submit your URLs to Yahoo at all. They will find and index all your pages for free if you just give them a crawler-friendly site and the time to do so.” This also applies to Google and the other major search engines. Manual submission is not necessary because their spiders will usually find and index your automatically.

Marcia, a prominent poster on the SEO forums, said at WebmasterWorld, “They (search engines) all find sites through links anyway. Some people don't even bother with submitting at all anymore.” On the SEW forums, Marcia goes on to say that these submission services may violate the search engine terms of service agreement which could result in getting your site banned.

WebmasterWorld poster “bufferzone” echoes this by saying, “Some SE’s don’t like auto tools and will penalize or ban sites where these tools are used. They are relatively easy to recognize and therefore relatively easy to handle for the SE’s.”

A look at some of the submission service providers that appeared in Google’s AdWord area is a telling one. One service claims that for a nominal fee, they will submit your site to 800,000 search engines and directories. That’s right, 800,000. As I’ve said before, I’m still learning about the SEO/SEM industry, but I can tell you emphatically, there aren’t 800,000 search engines on the market. In fact, it’s the big four (Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask) that drive the majority of the search engine traffic. And if you don’t believe the noob, I’ll let Marcia reinforce my statement:

“There aren't any thousands of search engines, there are only a few that actually drive any traffic. And those will find sites through following links.” Meaning that if you have backlinks from other sites pointing to yours, the major search engines that drive the market will find you.

Following this rationale, you wind up paying for a service that’s going to “submit” your site to who knows where. Granted, there are smaller search engines and directories to which sites can be submitted, but I’m not sure if they number into the hundreds of thousands.

Prices for these services range from $19.95 to $179.99 and higher. From reading the majority of the responses concerning this subject, it seems like this money could be better spent. If you have ANY backlinks to your site, the major search engines will usually find you. Submission of any kind isn’t necessary.

To be fair, people who have used these services seem to be pleased with their investments. It’s not that these companies don’t do what they say (although, 800,000 is a little extreme), rather, it’s whether or not these services are even needed. When reading what the SEO experts have to say, you are left with one conclusion: These services are not required in order for search engines to find your site.

Marcia concludes these thoughts rather well by saying, “Save your money and put whatever resources you have into learning more about site promotion so you'll be operating on a solid base. There's a wealth of information available for anyone who's willing to learn, some at modest cost and some at no cost.”

Thanks to rustybrick at SearchEngineRoundtable for pointing this out.

[debase23]

I bet whomever made up that number must have been counting internal searchers.

The article brings to mind the evil sibling of SEO - paid inclusion! If you know that all the listings searched by, f'instance, mamma.com, have paid to be there, you're getting both a sliver of what's online and a sucker list for your own paid listing project.

[jbgilbert]

One more reason not to use these automated submission services:

If you pick the wrong submission service, you will begin receiving more spam emails from more places than you every dreamed of!

[Chris]

guys, thanks for the comments. the thing that stuck out to me was the idea of Google and Yahoo banning sites that have been automatically submitted.

one has to wonder, if there is any inkling that a search engine may penalize or ban you because of using a submission service, why use it to begin with?

[Christian_SEO]

We submit the main URL by hand, but we submit all the other site URLs with a submission program, and guess what? No banning and no problems.

However, we don't submit to "thousands", places that only ask for one submission, or FFA or other junk sites. The SPAM response emails? Actually, some have special offers or are confirmations that we have been listed. We set up a special email address and look at them every once in a while for the clients. If anything of interest comes through we forward it on.

We've been doing this for over 4 years now, so in our experience, hand submission is best, but automated submissions, done correctly, can be somewhat effective and more importantly, cost-effective.

For some reason, perhaps from real stories about real abuses and problems in the past, the professional SEO community (not just submitters) has a huge attitude problem on this subject. I have yet to see much in the way of documented banning from reasonable submissions, but that is the nature of what we do in general.

The talk about not needing to submit is somewhat true, but misleading. You still need to submit to directories and sites that do not spider. And if a site accepts submissions, well why the heck not submit at least once to try to speed up the process...??? Hello, that's why they have a submission page. It's not there to trick you...

So to me, submission itself if a good thing, not bad, and may well be worth the trouble. The same is true for automated submission, but it needs to be done right. At our directory we see a number of automated submissions. They often have the description or keywords cut off because they didn't fit in the space we provide. If I see this and the site is borderline, then I'll dump it.

I should say that our main reason for using automated submission is that it's too expensive for the client to pay us to hand submit all the pages of their site to about 180 systems for the average project. Why so many? Well, aside from the fact that some small search engines grow up to have huge IPOs, each listing is also a link and some people think that also has value...

[rustybrick]

Interesting, I can be certain I read an article about this yesterday, with links to the same posts. :)

No hard feelings.

[Chris]

rusty, my original word document gave you credit, much like garrett did. hmmm.


i guess i edited it out... give me a sec and i'll change that back. sorry about that.

[rustybrick]

Its ok. Don't worry about it. I'm just messing with you.

[Chris]

naw it's no biggie. the original article on WPN has it, it just confuses me why i left it out of the post. i guess we'll just call in an oversight on my part. ;)

[cbp]

IMHO, paid submission services to search engines are a scam

IMHO, manual submissions to search engines are not only a waste of time and energy, they can actually harm you, in the sense that the time you waste manually submiting could have been spent doing something else that really helps.

We have had numerous threads this.

CBP