Submitting to Search Engines

Here are links to submit your site to the major search engines...

• Google
• Yahoo!
• Microsoft

...but most pages that get submitted to search engines are of low-quality. There is no guarantee that your site will get included for free just by submitting it, and even if it is included, it is not going to rank for competitive search queries unless some people link at it. The best way to get listed in search engines is to get other people to link to your site.

Paid Inclusion

Yahoo! is currently the only major search engine to offer a paid inclusion program. Yahoo! Search Submit Basic lists sites in all of the Yahoo search properties. But you don’t need to use paid inclusion to get listed in search engines. Most useful and original websites will get included in the search indexes for free if they build a few links.

How often do Search Engines Crawl?

Search engines constantly crawl the web. Sites that frequently update with strong link popularity may get crawled many times each day. Pages that do not change that often, pages that are associated with spammy sections of the web, and/or sites that have little link popularity may get crawled only once or twice a month.

Sites like CNN are crawled hundreds or thousands of times each day. Google indexes the content of authoritative blogs in near real-time. Since search engines are constantly adding content to their index, their rankings are in a constant state of flux.

How Search Engines Evaluate Links

Through the eyes of a search engine, you usually cannot control who links to you, but you can control to whom you link.. In most cases, if bad sites link to you, it does not hurt you. If you link back, it does. So in essence, it usually does not hurt you to get inbound links. You should be rather selective with whom you are willing to link out.

Warnings:

• If you are aggressively buying links for PageRank and search engineers can associate the link buying with you then your site they may harm your rankings.
• If most of your links come from spammy sites and you have few or no trusted links search engines may assume your site is spam.

Start With Trust

Some search algorithms may look at the good link to bad link ratio. If your site has few well-trusted links and many low-quality ones, they may filter out your site if they suspect it of overt ranking manipulation. When you get quality links, you are not only getting the boost those links may give you, but you are also lowering your risk profile and naturalizing your link profile.

Some links are a sure sign of quality. For example, if you are listed in the Yahoo! Directory, search engines know that at some point in time an editor working at a search company reviewed your website, and they know you likely paid $300 for that one link, which is a sign that your site is more likely to be legit than an automated churn and burn 99 cent .info domain. If you are trying to replicate the success of a competing site, it is important to start by trying to get a number of higher quality links before getting too many low-quality links.

If you are unsure if something is a quality link or not, ask yourself if you were a search engineer would you want to trust that link. If the answer is yes, then it is a quality link. It is still okay to get some low-quality links, as automated scraper sites and other junk sites give practically all well-ranked sites a bunch of low-quality links, but the key to doing well in the long term is to try to create a reason why people would want to give you quality links.

More Free Inclusion Programs

Search engines came together to create an XML sitemaps protocol to help them index your website. Keep in mind that even if you use programs like Sitemaps, you need to use your internal link structure and external link profile to help search engines index your content and understand what pages are most important. Anything that is linked to frequently from other trusted pages becomes important through the transference of that trust.

Numerous webmasters have also created free XML Sitemap generator programs that make it easy to create an XML Sitemap.

Google Webmaster Central

Google's Webmaster Central shows you what Google searches send the most visitors to your site and if Googlebot is having any crawling issue with your site.

Yahoo Search Builder

In a December 2006 interview Yahoo’s Tim Mayer stated that Yahoo may do a more comprehensive crawl of sites which use their Search Builder site search product.