New site owners are always eager to get listed in the search engines, and why not – it’s such an ego trip to see your site in the search engines for the first time (hopefully for some relevant, searched keywords!), and to think about the amounts of money and information you can exchange online. Call your friends, partners and your business networks and just tell them you are “all over the Internet”.
However, many spend too much time doing it incorrectly, manually, or via software automation (spamming). They add 100’s of links and descriptions to as many search engines and related directories as quickly as possible. They feel that this exercise will surely avert the dreaded (and mythical) Google Sandbox, where new sites appear to be “stuck” with no ability to be searched or found – for weeks, possibly months. And, they believe that Pagerank and Authority will quickly be built.
Not only are you possible spamming the search engines and directories – but you are not going about it the right way.
First of all, the Google sandbox does not exist. While true that newer sites will receive a higher level of scrutiny from SE’s like Google – there is no real truth to that rumour. However, you should not try to fix it by adding your site to 100’s of search engines (there’s really only 4 that matter) – instead, setup and organize your site and links, and you will have no problem at all.
If you want to add to search engines and directories, use a more comprehensive strategy, and add to these sections with the top 4 engines – Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask:
Google:
- Organic sites (add url)
- Paid Advertising & Contextual (sign up url)
- Directory Listing – ODP (add url)
- Google Local (add url)
- Geo Targeting (description, signup & video)
- Shopping Portal (add products)
- Google News (recommend listing)
Yahoo:
- Submit a site (add url)
- Submit Express (add url) *other types exist on this page, including express – paid inclusion
- Paid Advertising (sign up)
- Content Match (sign up)
- The Directory! (sign up)
- Local search (sign up) * also, local enhanced
- Shopping/Products (sign up)
- Travel (sign up) and News (submit listing)
MSN:
- Submit Organic (add url)
- Paid Advertising (sign up)
- Local Search (sign up)
- Shopping (sign up)
- Travel (sign up)
Ask.com has additional links you might want to check out as well:
- pricegrabber.com
- https://sp.ask.com/docs/ajinteractive/mediasolutions.html
- https://sp.ask.com/docs/ajinteractive/searchsolutions.html
The simple secret to effective web search index inclusion uses the strategies above, but it first starts with links – get as many high quality and relevant ones as you can – and you’ll be included faster than you can say “am I out of the sandbox yet“? Do this over time, not in one day, or one week – and you’ll see your traffic and business grow.
(To this day, I have never used the links for search engine submission, I simply build links and search engines come spidering. But, for products, directories and shopping portals, you should use the above).