LONG Re: Search engine submission software

From: Eric Ward <netpost_at_netpost.com>
Date: Sun, 27 Jun 1999 13:36:15 -0500 (CDT)

DANNY SULLIVAN WROTE:
>However, I do agree with Craig that for the major services,
>it probably is best to do manual submissions. There are few
>of them that they don't take much time. Some auto-submit
>tools may not do a deep submit of your site at places where
>this is acceptable, too. But it's wrong to make a blanket
>statement that these tools cannot be used to submit to the
>major spider-based services.

Good one Danny. The thing that has always baffled me about
autosubmission software is why people even take a chance
with the main engines when these are the fastest and easiest
to do by hand anyway. I once timed myself making
submissions for a pair of sites, one way via a popular
autosubmitter and the other site by hand one-at-a-time going
to each actual engine's form. It took me 5 minutes to make
submissions to the main 10 engines using the autosubmitter
and 7 minutes doing them all one at a time. 2 minutes
difference.

There is no point in taking the chance to save 2 minutes.

I see the temptation if you are looking at it from a "submit
to 400 search engines" viewpoint. 400 takes a lot of time.
But frankly, none of those 400 will do diddiliy for you
anyway. I tested one in 1997 on a URL created solely for
that test. Two years later I still do not have one single
verifiable server log referrer from any of the 400 listed,
except from the main engines.

My ongoing traffic comes from, in order of %

35% A collection of about 200 inbound links I went and
got in topical/vertical Web guides and other places
(none of these types of crucial places will ever be in
those 'submit to 400 engines' deals)
20% 10-15 main engines
15% Portal site reviews at 6 different portals
15% A collection of link swap sites
10% Yahoo
5% Unknown

The truth is that beyond the best of the best bots, any site
that takes submissions from the mass autosubmitters is
getting hammered with so many junk submissions every minute
of every day that it is useless. Many so-called directories
WANT autosubmitters to submit to them, because they are
really just fake directories looking for a steady flow of
leads for their real business, and the autosubmitters are
happy to oblige them becasue the autosubmitter can now say
'we submit to 401 places' instead of 400.

Any one of us can set up a pseudo Website directory in about
4 hours and then send email to the main autosubmitters
asking them to please include our new directory in their
submission list. Then we start getting a steady stream of
new site submissions to our new directory, and we send out a
nice thank-you message to all those site owners using those
autosubmitters to submit to us, telling them how happy we
are that they submitted their site to our directory and
would they be so nice as to link back to us and
oh-by-the-way would they like to buy an assblaster 2000?

Regards,

Eric Ward <eric_at_netpost.com>

T h e W a r d G r o u p
Announcing The Web's Top Launches And Events Since 1994
=======================================================
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Received on Sun Jun 27 1999 - 16:48:33 CDT