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Facts of the week: The myth of the 50,000
search engines
There are submission services (and spam email messages) that
promise to submit your web site to 50,000 search engines.
Some web site promotion tools also claim that they can submit
your web site to thousands of search engines.
Thousands of search engines?
There aren't thousands of search engines on the Internet.
Period. The majority of these 50,000 so called "search
engines" are free for all (FFA) link pages or special
interest web pages.
Submitting your web page to thousands of FFA sites means
that you'll end up with thousands of spam email messages.
In addition, you won't receive a single visitor when you
submit your web site about office equipment to a directory
of poets in Poland.
There's only a handful of search engines that can really
bring visitors to your web site. As always, it's quality that
matters, not quantity. For this reason, you should concentrate
on the important search engines when you submit your web site
to search engines.
Which search engines are important?
Currently, there are only three major players: Google, Yahoo
and MSN Search. They are responsible for the bigger part of
the search engine traffic you can get because they also power
other search engines, for example the search engine on AOL.com
displays Google results.
Then there are search engines that are not so popular but
they can bring you some additional visitors, for example Ask
Jeeves and Teoma.
In addition, there are country specific search engines. If
you have a German web site, you should also submit to the
popular German search engines, for instance Fireball.de.
What about directories?
Directories are different from search engines because all
web site submissions are reviewed by humans. There are several
directories where your web site should be listed. The most
important one is The Open Directory Project at www.dmoz.org.
You should also submit to topic specific search engines.
If your web site sells garden equipment, you should submit
your web site to specific garden directories. Even if they
don't send you some visitors, they could improve the link
popularity of your web site which helps your ranking in other
search engines.
Where can I get a list of all important search engines
and directories?
In the free demo version of the web
site promotion tool IBP, you can find a list of all important
search engines and directories. It also lists country specific
search engines and special interest directories. Just click
the "Supported search engines" button in IBP's main
window.
Needless to say that you can use IBP to submit
to all these search engines and directories, too.
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