I’m constantly amazed at the number of people who still talk about submitting to search engines. Heck, we have not submitted sites to search engines in over two years, but to many of the uninformed (no offense if that is you) search engine submission is still believed to be a crucial part of optimization. Its not!
The problem is that there are still a number of “search engine submission services” out there that are more than willing to take your money for this useless activity. Even Microsoft has a service (formerly bCentral) that will submit your site for a fee. Microsoft, of all companies, should know better.
Every day I get clients and potential clients asking me if we will submit their site to the engines. Each time I answer “No” and must explain why. Quite simply, search engine submissions are useless. Any so-called submission service will tell you that your site will be submitted to hundreds, if not thousands of search engines. Problem is, there are not hundreds of places worth submitting your site to. I can count twenty at most, but really would not be bothered with any more than the top 5 search engines at all. But even still, we don’t submit to them either. Why? Because, and I say it again, search engine submissions are useless.
Search engines do not really pay attention to these submissions. They would rather find your site on its own without you having to tell them your site is there. Even if your submission was not ignored, if the search engine cannot find your site naturally through linking, you won’t net any kind of ranking, as linking is a primary factor in the search algorithms.
Bottom line; don’t bother with search engine submissions. Don’t fall for any company that tells you they’ll submit your site, in fact, don’t even worry about submitting your site anywhere, except to web directories. If your site is worth finding, the search engines WILL find it.