How to get a search engine listing

There are many good sites out there that you will never find because they are not listed on any search engine. There are services around that will submit your site every month to the major search engines and they charge a fee for this. Such services are a total waste of money. Imagine if I sent you an email every month telling you about my site. You would get pretty sick of it and would probably block my emails. The search engines will do something similar. Nobody likes spam.

Two important submissions

To get listed on most search engines you do not even need to submit your site. In fact I would advise you not to submit your site to any engine, with two exceptions. The exceptions are the Yahoo directory and the dmoz.org directory. After you have submitted your site to these directories, if it is accepted, your work is done. Submitting your site to these directories can be done by clicking on their name, finding a category and following the instructions. If you use any of the submission services you risk upsetting the search engines, not because of what you have done yourself, but because other people have used the services to spam. Some search engines ignore such submissions.

But their are more than two search engines

"So what about the other search engines?" I hear you ask. "Don't worry, be patient" is my reply. How the search engines collect sites to list is, to a large extent, by following links. The dmoz.org page that the above link takes you to says that it could take a few months for all of the search engines to find and list your site, but it will happen. Submitting your site any other way is very risky. The search engines are easily upset and if you annoy them, they may never again have anything to do with your site.

What if it doesn't work?

If your site is not accepted by either the Yahoo or the dmoz.org directories (or even if it is), you can still get listed with the search engines (including the Yahoo search engine which is separate from the Yahoo directory). You could go to each engine and submit your site to each one, but only try this once to avoid upsetting them. A more amenable way to get listed is to put links to your site on pages that are already listed. You can do this via some guestbooks (find these by doing a two word search - one word for the category of your site, the other word is "guestbook"). A message "great site" and a link to your own site wont upset anyone and it gives a link to your site for the search engines to follow. Make sure, if you do this, that the link is clickable. Just naming your site wont help. Other ways to place links for the engines to follow are by joining a webring or using forums, but don't spam (if you do your posting will be deleted and your work wasted). Another way, that will get you a bit of traffic (you might get a couple of hits from a link in a guestbook, but no more) is to get a link on the links page of a listed site. If you have one site that is listed, use that. Otherwise you can exchange links with webmasters. Good luck!

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