most of our SEO clients asked us one same question, “will you submit my site to search engines?” when we say, no. they were rather surprised, and in some cases, not so happy. “hey, i know this search engine optimization service company submit to 46,678 search engines! and for free!”

the truth is, there’re less than 100 search engines in the whole world, among them, only less than 10 matters. 99% of those small search engines and web directories are powered by Google, Inktomi, AllTheWeb, or Open Directory.

how many search engines are you aware of? 10? 20? how many do you actually use? 2 or 3? where are the thousands of search engines they’re going to submit to?

where they will submit your site to are Free For All, or FFA, pages. Yes, there’re tens of thousands of them. but getting listed in FFA pages will not do any good to your search engine rankings. and nobody will ever visit those FFA sites. therefore you won’t get any traffic from this kind of mass submission.

some companies offer manual submission services to real search engines (not FFA as explained above) every month as an important part of their SEO package. well, if they provide this for free, it might be fine. if this is the major part of their work that they’re going to charge for even $10 per month, i’d suggest you spend that 10 bucks on a good movie.

the big problem is, it Might Be Fine. in another word, you might be penalized for that. contrary to what you may be thinking, it does not hurt to not submit!

submission to search engines has no effect on your rankings. the only search engine that honors free submission currently is Google. however, submission only makes Google aware of your page. It’s not relevant to if and how your site will be ranked. other search engines all have paid inclusion programs therefore discard free submission most probably.

an experienced SEO company, company that knows what they’re doing, will spend time on actual optimization work instead of wasting time on submission.