Why you should not submit your site to 1000 search engines

I admit; I fell for it once – almost twice.
You have seen the ads, "Submit your site to 200+ Search Engines… 1000+ Search Engines… "

The second time, submitting my site to all those great search engines was for free and attached to a website that I was visiting. Since it was absolutely free, what was there to lose? Soon after automatically submitting my site into the very cool automated submitter-bot, the emails began pouring in asking me to check a box accepting that my site was to be listed by some search engine I had never heard of (…and I am the author of a search engine directory), but explaining that I would need to opt-in to receive some newsletter (better described as a ‘spamletter’). Otherwise my site would not be listed. I had never even heard of a single one of these search engines before in my life and I am reasonably sure that nobody else has ever heard of any of them either.

… I get it… so they are spammers pretending to be some kind of search engine. But we know that everyone really uses Google or Yahoo… so we can ignore these phony so-called search engines.

Experimentation is a good thing on the web. Try a few things, see if they work. Repeat the things that work, stop doing the things that do not. Thanks to habits like this, you quickly learn the things that work and the things that are a huge waste of your time and virtually guarantee you a healthy serving of future aggravation. Search Engine submitting services are one of the latter.

How many Search Engines can you even name?

Can you even name 10 search engines without looking at a listing? Submitting your website to all these search engines is one thing that is sure to annoy you and pack your inbox full of spam – tons and tons of spam. Most of these ‘search engines’ are not actually search engines at all but lists of suckers who have signed up to submit their sites to these ostensible ‘search engines’, and in exchange for being listed in "suckersearch.com", they have to check a box that lets the spammers at "suckersearch.com" fill their inbox with their incessant and useless newsletters – packed with overpriced affiliate links and offers to spend money. Thank goodness I always use a temporary ‘spam-catcher’ email address for offers like this. I have gone back to check my ‘spam-catcher’ email after signing up for one of these services and noticed that the inbox is overflowing with this garbage and other fantastically annoying and coincidental spam.

Spammers have gotten increasingly desperate in their efforts to get people to ‘opt-in’ to receiving all of this unwanted correspondence. It has also not gone unnoticed by these spammers that many people would like to somehow rise in the search engine rankings and doing so is regarded as a kind of black magic by many. Thus, not long ago, one clever spammer got smart and decided to create a mysterious search engine program that would help your site rise in the rankings. The catch is that you must agree to accept all his spam and/or agree to receive a regular newsletter from him. Ingenious. But it does not help your search engine ranking one bit.

Who Uses all those Search Engines?

Nobody.
The only search engines that people really use can be seen on the master list at TheSearchEngineList.com, mostly Google and Yahoo!. None of them require you to accept frequent mailings of some annoying newsletter.

So Don’t fall for SuckerSearch!

Don’t fall for suckersearch. Don’t submit your site to 157 varieties of search engine that nobody uses nor has even heard of. Do not pay to be listed in a directory of suckers who thought that by paying some company they had never before heard of, they would get a number one ranking in Google and customers would be lined up on the sidewalk in front of their business.

When you see a site offering to list your site in 100 or more search engines for some small fee or even for free… well, don’t even waste the click – not even if they pay you. Hit the back button and go to a site which can actually help. You know what you need to do. It looks a bit like work.

• Optimize your site for keywords.
• Get backlinks. Even if you have to buy them.
• If you are ambitious, write articles with links to your site and distribute them.

That’s it.