Search engine submission is how a webmaster submits a
web site directly to a search engine. While Search Engine
Submission is often seen as a way to promote a web site,
it generally is not necessary. Because the major search
engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN use crawlers, bots,
and spiders that eventually would find all by themselves
most web sites on the Internet.
There are two basic reasons to submit a web site or web
page to a search engine. The first reason would be to
add an entirely new web site because the site operators
would rather not wait for a search engine to discover
them. The second reason is to have a web page or web site
updated in the respective search engine.
| Contents : |
| 1 How web sites are submitted |
| 1 Sitemaps |
| 2 Search engine submission companies |
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| 2 Search engine submission services no longer
necessary |
| 3 References |
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| 4 See also |
How web sites are submitted
There are two basic methods still in use today that would
allow a webmaster to submit their site to a search engine.
They can either submit just one web page at a time. Or,
they can submit their entire site at one time with a sitemap.
However, all that a webmaster really needs to do is to
submit just the home page of a web site. With just the
home page, most search engines are able to crawl a site,
provided that it is well designed.
Web sites desire to be listed in popular search engines
because that is how most people access web sites. People
like to search for information on the web at what is known
as a search engine. Sites that appear on the first page
of a search are said to be in the top 10. Clicking on
a hyperlink causes the found web page to appear in the
searchers web browser.
Thus, webmasters often highly desire that their sites
appear in the top 10 in a search engine search. This is
because searchers are not very likely to look over more
than one page of search results, known as a SERPs.
In order to obtain good placement on search results in
the various engines, webmasters must optimize their web
pages. The process is called search engine optimization.
Many variables come into play, such as the placement and
density of desirable keywords, the hierarchy structure
of web pages employed in a web site (i.e., How many clicks
from the home page are required to access a particular
web page?) , and the number of web pages that link to
a given web page. The Google search engine also uses a
concept called page rank.
PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of
the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator
of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets
a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for
page B. But, Google looks at considerably more than the
sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example,
it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast
by pages that are themselves "important" weigh
more heavily and help to make other pages "important."
Using these and other factors, Google provides its views
on pages' relative importance ( Source: http://www.google.com/technology/)
Sitemaps
Google Sitemaps was introduced in June 2005 so web developers
could publish lists of links from across their sites. The
sitemap is used to make the search engine aware of the site
and the pages on the site.
At this moment XML sitemap support
Google, Yahoo, Ask.com, MSN. Also, the location of the Sitemap
can be specified using a robots.txt file to help search
engines find the Sitemaps.
Search engine submission companies
Earlier in the history of the web the submission process
could be automated. Now a days, however, most search engines
have implemented steps to prevent this.
Nevertheless, many commercial businesses still exist
that offer to automatically place any web site with several
hundred search engines for a fee. These business services
are generally considered to be scam operations because
they do not work. Nor, are they even necessary. There
are little more than a dozen or two search engines to
begin with. And, there are really only 3 major search
engines. It shouldn't take longer than 15 minutes to submit
a site to all three of these search engines. Google, for
example, has dozens and dozens of foreign editions. But,
they really are just the same search engine. And, many
of the lesser search engines are powered from the Google
engine index.
Most search engines currently require the input of randomly
generated characters displayed on your browser screen
when submitting a site. This feature makes automatic submission
of a web site by a commercial submission service to many
different search engines no longer physically possible.
Search engine submission services no longer necessary
By 2004, search engine submission
services became unnecessary because the major search engines,
"the big four", Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft Live
and Ask.com, already had the ability to automatically discover
new webpages by crawling links from other sites. Professional
search engine optimizers, such as Jill Whalen, have stated
that search engine submission is unnecessary. In fact, automated
search engine submission may violate the search engines'
terms of service, creating the potential for a site using
such a service to be banned.
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