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About Search Engines - Part 3

Part 3 - How to get listed

Don't wait to be discovered! Submit you URL directly to the search engine or directory.

Search Engine submissions.

  • Manual Submission - Use the Add URL form from the search engine site itself.

    This way, you have absolute control over whereyour site is submitted. However, this process is that it is a very time consuming and labor intensive activity. Some search engines bury their Add URL form so far down in the site that one wonders if they are intentionally trying to thwart potential applicants.

  • Automated Submission Tool - Fill in the data once and the tool automatically submits your URL to multiple engines.

    It is a fast, easy one step process and you only have to fill the data forms once. One down side to this is that because most submission services submit to many search engines, you may get spam email by some of the smaller engines that occasionally sell their email addresses.

    Note: It is not the submission tool company that is selling the email addresses, it is the search engines themselves. For this reason, we recommend you use an alternate email address when submitting with automated submission tools.

Your best strategy is to submit weekly until your site gets listed. Check your listing frequently. If your site disappears suddenly, you may be victim of a search engine database omission. Search engines frequently have multiple versions of their databases and they aren't always in sync. You may be listed in one version of their database and not in another. Your only recourse is to resubmit your site.

To see if you have even been picked up in a search engine, go to the search engine's site and do a search with your company's domain name as the search query.

Directory Submissions

Submitting to a directory is a much more involved specialized process. Don't do it in a rush and don't use an automated submission tool. The better submission tools, like Search Engine Starter, don't submit to directories.

How long does it take to get listed?

These times vary with search engines and directories. The search engines will optimistically report a very short time, but most sites get listed within the following times:

Altavista 1 - 2 weeks
Excite, Lycos 4 weeks
HotBot 2 weeks
Google 4 - 6 weeks
Infoseek 6 - 8 weeks
Northern Light 2 - 4 weeks
Webcrawler 3 months

The reality is that most search engines and directories are very backlogged and slow to get listings added to their databases. Don't be surprised if you experience waits much longer than these. As mentioned earlier, you may wait over 5 months to see your site get listed on Yahoo!, if it gets listed at all.

We recommend that if your site isn't listed within the time periods above, that you resubmit your site to the search engine where you are not listed.

Is being listed engine good enough?

Unfortunately no.

A listing won't automatically increase your traffic. A good ranking may. You want to be listed on the first three pages of the search engine results page. Most web surfers aren't patient enough to look more than the first 20-40 listed links. In fact there is a considerable drop off just going from the first to the second page.