Search engine submission services – what a waste of money

It’s the last day of 2007 and I still can’t believe that there are companies out there selling "search engine marketing" services that are primarily based on a small amount of SEO and then a monthly submission service.   This is a concept that was considered "old hat" and ineffective even when we first opened our doors back in 2001.  To think that as a new year approaches there are companies still ripping off their clients with these sort of ineffective services is a cause of great frustration for many of us trying to offer legitate and effective search marketing services.

You should be aware that you rarely have to submit a site to any search engine at all these days,  but if you do – it is only needed once (when you launch a new site).  Resubmitting your site to the search engines will not help you and your website rankings.  These sorts of services tend to be automated and unmanned and are a complete waste of money.  

If the concept behind this approach is to ensure that a search engine can find all of your content, then the preferred method now is to create a sitemap.  Sitemaps are used by all major search engines and are a list of all the content/pages that you want the search engines to index.  They can be updated as you update your site and simply need a line in a file called robots.txt (located on your site).  They do not require submission.

The point is that the search engines will find your site and with a site map can find all of your content within your site too.  There is no need to resubmit your site to search engines on a regular basis.

If this type of service is a major component of any "SEO" service that you are being offered, don’t just hesitate – run.

Related Posts

1. Search Engine Submission – That’s So Last Decade
2. XML Sitemaps – do they really get pages indexed?
3. New Sitemap Protocol Additions
4. Google Webmaster Tools and Sitemap.xml files
5. Companies Wasting Money on PPC Branded Keyword Search
6. Submission Service From Hell
7. Making Search Engine Optimisation easier
8. SEO is a waste of effort

This entry was posted on Monday, December 31st, 2007 at 10:27 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.