Is It Worth It To Use Free Search Engine Submission Software?
July 3rd, 2010Free search engine submission software may not cost you anything in money, but it does have a cost in terms of the time that it takes you to set it up and use it. So is it worthwhile? Does submitting your site to the search engines have any real effect on the way that your site will appear in the search engines?
Search Engine Submission History
When the world wide web began to grow, developers quickly realized that there was a need for visitors to be able to search the whole internet so that they could more easily find what they were looking for. Search engines such as Google were set up to examine all of the sites on the internet and create an index of what each site contained, so that they could return results to people who were searching. Soon there were thousands of these search engines competing for people’s attention.
In the beginning the search engines were not very effective in finding new sites. It was necessary for sites to be submitted in order to be listed quickly. Submission services were set up by companies who would tell all of the thousands of search engines about your site. They used software to do this. Soon it became possible to find free search engine submission software for webmasters who wanted to do it themselves.
However, the search engines soon improved. They developed robots that can crawl the whole internet all of the time, looking for new sites and new pages on old sites to add to their search results. As early as 2004, experts were beginning to say that there was no point in submitting sites to the bigger search engines.
The Position Today – Established Sites
Today, just about all of the search engines have become skilled at finding sites. If your site has been established for some time and has links pointing to it from other websites that are known to the search engines, there is no need to submit it anywhere. Even the smaller search engines will already have found it through those links. So you do not need to use free search engine submission software for a site that other sites already link to.
New Sites
For a new site, you might want to submit to some or all of the search engines just to make the process of indexing quicker. However, be aware that some engines now consider automatic submission through the use of paid or free search engine submission software to be a form of spamming. This means that they might actually mark your site down or even ban it for submitting in this way.
If your site is built with WordPress, you should be able to get indexed relatively quickly just by the automatic ‘pinging’ system that is built in to WordPress. This notifies certain sites whenever there is a new post on your blog.
For static sites you might still want to use a submission service or software to submit to the smaller search engines. However, it is probably best to avoid submitting to the big engines like Google, Yahoo or Bing this way. It is better to build some links to your site so that they can find it in a natural, organic way.
Building links for the purpose of getting indexed is quite simple. You just need to have links to your site from other sites that the large search engines regularly crawl. For example you could post an article at a well established article directory such as ezinearticles.com, and create pages at Squidoo, Hub Pages or Blogger. Just have a link to your site at the end of each article. These days, there is not really any need to use free search engine submission software.
