This isn’t going to be a long post but it is certainly going to be a rant about the misleading information being spread around to beginners at SEO. It isn’t just effecting those interested in doing SEO it’s effecting those that are purchasing services from people doing SEO and thinking it is all about search engine submissions.
In fact, I would go ahead and suggest that if you see someone say anything about submitting a site to a search engine, you’re full of crap!
I saw a company advertise that they submit your website to 300+ search engines.
Not only are people advertising that garbage, business owners are often fooled into thinking that’s how it works.
This is not the year 2000.
Submitting Your Site to Search Engines DOES NOTHING!
I saw someone ask on a forum not too long ago about why they weren’t indexed, they did everything they were supposed to. “Everything they were supposed to do” consisted of submitting their site to different search engines, and installing a plugin to create a sitemap.
That isn’t SEO…
Creating a sitemap is just something every basic webmaster would do.
We’re in 2015 where Google and other search engines are extremely sophisticated, with multiple advanced algorithms, non stop crawling, indexing, and an immeasurable amount of data at their disposal.
This website, the Income Bully blog, was indexed before I ever told anyone about it, before ever building a backlink, and without ever submitting it to a search engine.
Submitting your website or blog to a search engine hasn’t been effective since 2001.
Why Isn’t It Necessary?
Well first off, most search engines will publicly tell you that they don’t pay attention to search engine submissions anymore, it’s a thing of the past.
As long as you don’t have robot tags that are disallowing or have the tag “noindex” you will show up in the search engines without doing anything else. They will crawl your website whether you do anything or not.
Your website will be indexed automatically. The submission process isn’t made by owners of a website, it happens through domain registry records and Google automatically will crawl a newly registered domain. If you for some reason are having problems getting indexed, then build a backlink.
What About Pinging My Site or Backlinks?
It’s not necessary.
Pinging your site or blog has become a popular thing even though it isn’t really beneficial. The more beneficial alternative is setting up Google and Bing Webmaster Tools, and submitting your sitemap. Assuming you use any sort of CMS with a sitemap plugin, search engines will automatically crawl your new posts.
Even if you don’t do that, you’ll still get your posts crawled because once Google indexes your website, they continue coming back more and more to see if there are changes in content, or code.
Summary
Submitting a site to a search engine is useless. It’s no longer necessary and hasn’t been for close to 15 years. I don’t understand why people are still talking about manual submissions, and if you see someone advertising search engine submissions, you can pretty much assume they don’t know what they’re doing. If YOU have been thinking you need to submit sites to search engines… now you know it’s time to stop!
I remember buying search engine submission blasts and 1,000,000 search engine and directory blasts several years ago. They did work for smaller search engines, but even back in the day the blasts weren’t that great and didn’t translate into good rankings.
It’s definitely a waste of money. When you use WordPress first thing it does after your first post is ping your site. I think that tells the search engines you’re ready for prime time, even though Google is definitely an ICANN accredited registrar.
Yeah and I guess they still are relevant for some very small search engines but usually those search engines aren’t going to produce any sort of market share to really justify doing it. I think even pinging has become almost irrelevant now as well, especially if you’ve already created and submitted a sitemap.
Nice post! that is good information, it is useful to me thanks.
I AM FULL OF CRAP – I submit to search engines… Most prominently I submit to DMOZ. There are some other minor engines I submit to depending on the site itself. Sites like blogsearchengine or icerocket quickly come to mind, even “http://www.bhanvad.com” as an example, depending on the desired market. ( there are many big hitting ( reginal search site worth submission )
I might actually ping stuff like “https://www.google.com/blogsearch” as an example.
I would say that the practice of submitting isn’t dead.. just far more selective ( targeted )
There’s a difference between submitting to search engines and what you’re talking about. You’re essentially submitting to directories, not search engines. DMOZ, blogsearchengine, are directories with a search component.