Which SEs to submit and how?

[Yauhen]

Recently I've done a lot of learning about SEO. But now the question which seemed obvious has become a hard challenge.

How to submit to search engines? There're millions of SEs and directories. Looks like there's no need to submit to them all. Is there a minimum of best ones?

What about paid submission services? They offer things like submission to 700,000 SEs. Is that shit? At least sounds like it!

[Linkster]

Yes - the paid submissions are BS - they are mostly to FFAs and other worthless link farms - not worth your time and can get you blacklisted by the real SEs - so can some of the submission software out there advertised for sale.

Most SEs will find you (instead of you having to submit) by having links from other sites - thats how they prefer to add sites.

http://searchenginewatch.com/links/ has a good starting list

[Yauhen]

Submission software! Any suggestions! I'm just afraid of getting fucked up with some shit, you know! Some companies offer submission tools for round about $600! That's a little too much, isn't it?

[ronnie]

Linkster said it, not worth the money and ya, best to have the SE's find you through links on other sites. Plus who's to say these submission services wont get you banned by submitting wrong or too much? And submission is a very small part of getting SE traffic. You can submit all you want, does'nt mean you'll get any traffic.

I dont see how submission software would be worth it. Probably 95% of the good SE traffic comes from the big guys like Google, Yahoo.

ronnie

[Linkster]

Like ronnie says - dont waste your money - most of the software out there is banned by Google and will definitely hurt you way more than ever help you - once you have submitted by hand to maybe 10 sites - the rest will find you on their own - More important is getting link trades with reliable sites - dont pay for it - just build up good relationships with people here to get good link trading
Also dont get sucked in to link building software - its also a waste and most people that get the emails from it will blacklist you as well

[Linkster]

I guess I should have also said - if youre doing adult sites - there's probably only about 10 SE's worth submitting to - the rest arent worth your time for the one hit they will send every two years

[Yauhen]

It's just about what I was guessing, all that you say. Many thanks for boosting my confidence by proving my hypotheses right.

If you can help me out with another little issue, I'll really appreciate.
When I use link popularity tool, it shows that I have quite a lot of links on Yahoo to my domain (which is mostly my free sites submitted to LLs and TGPs). But on Google I have 0 links. Even the links I exchanged with other webmasters don't show up. I guess I'm still gonna have that PR0, if things don't change, which is kind of dissapointing.
What the problem can be?

[neveremail]

Dont bother at all submitting to SEs - a waste of time. SEs find your sites through links to your site. Get more of those instead.

About the yahoo and google thing. Its completely normal - yahoo seems to states every link it has found where google seems to either omit some or not find the links as quickly. Dont worry about this.

Google is also slow to update your PR (do it approx every 3 months) and also a bit slower to update number of backlinks you have (in my experience). Also the PR you see is not actually what your real PR is - google keep real PR a secret and the Pr you see is an approximation designed not to be exact.

Just keep getting backlinks and your PR and rankings will slowly rise. Spend les time checking backlinks and PR and more time actually obtaining back links and writing for your site - you'll get more traffic that way

[ronnie]

Google has not showed the correct number of backlinks, I think since it started. Many say it's just playing with webmasters on backlinks, would'nt surprize me. Yahoo has always had a better or more accurate count.

And as far as I know most tools on the net that show you your back links, just use the SE's for counts anyways.

ronnie

[neveremail]

Originally Posted by ronnie

Google has not showed the correct number of backlinks, I think since it started. Many say it's just playing with webmasters on backlinks, would'nt surprize me. Yahoo has always had a better or more accurate count.

And as far as I know most tools on the net that show you your back links, just use the SE's for counts anyways.

ronnie

agree |cool|

[Yauhen]

Thanks! I'm a little happier now.
Does it help much if I have many links to my domain? Or maybe the most important issue is getting linked to particular pages of my site.
I do free sites almost every day. They get linked by LLs including big ones. But does it help the index page of my main site in terms of SE?

[neveremail]

Does it help much if I have many links to my domain? Or maybe the most important issue is getting linked to particular pages of my site.

I beleive:
Links to any page on your domain works but it effects the page that is links to the most, especailly what words are used to link to that page effect that particular page a lot. PR is spread throughout your site based on your internal linking structure - so if every page links to every page then PR spreads out well - some ppl try and channel it to certain pages - but I don't know much about this. Generally make sure your site is linked internally very well and that each page has an internal link to it and that each page links out to atleast one other page. From each page you should be able to links through your site and reach every other page.

[Linkster]

Quote from Google's representative:

"Google doesn't return all backlinks in response to a link: command. In the ancient days, it was because there was a finite amount of storage space on the machines that served link: requests. So we only kept the backlinks for the top N pages. Later as we moved to a different indexing system, we kept backlinks for the top M% of pages. This was helpful for important pages, but it meant that Mom and Pop sites with lower PageRank wouldn't have as good a chance to see their backlinks.
At SES London, DaveN had a suggestion. He said: why don't you give all pages an equal chance of seeing backlinks? That's good for users, who will have a greater chance of seeing backlinks for a given page, and it's especially good for smaller websites--they'd have a chance to see backlinks. It seemed like a good idea, so we implemented it. In fact, in order to give each page a better chance of seeing backlinks (instead of just the top M% of pages), we doubled the amount of backlinks that Google exports to the outside world. So users now have access to twice as much link: data as before; it's just not all the top PageRank pages.

... and ...

Given the large amount of data involved, and the fact that remarkably few people use the link: command, we don't show all backlinks externally, but we can access them internally."

Hope that helps understand why Google doesnt show nearly all the backlinks - PR is updated constantly, but they only update the "toolbar"/visible PR every 2-3 months

[neveremail]

Hope that helps understand why Google doesnt show nearly all the backlinks - PR is updated constantly, but they only update the "toolbar"/visible PR every 2-3 months

Didn't know that - thought it was all done on the google dance - not just toolbar PR.

[ronnie]

Originally Posted by Yauhen

Thanks! I'm a little happier now.
Does it help much if I have many links to my domain? Or maybe the most important issue is getting linked to particular pages of my site.
I do free sites almost every day. They get linked by LLs including big ones. But does it help the index page of my main site in terms of SE?

Any link back to your site helps, well long as the site linking in, is not a bad neighborhood.

Getting links from pages that are related to your page is even better. I think this is where so many submitters miss the boat. They complain about all the different catagory recips, which granted can be a lot, but in the long run it could be very well worth the time to get the right or very related/targeted links coming in. A little extra time the first time, could pay off in the long run.

ronnie

[Linkster]

neveremail - another quote for ya from Google rep:

One thing that I noticed in the first 300 posts or so was a discussion about whether backlinks or PageRanks were also being updated at the same time. In general, I wouldn't fixate too much on backlinks or PageRank during an update. The external backlinks/PR that we show have at least a couple factors that complicate analysis. First off, they are a snapshot in time, and the actual backlinks/PageRank used for ranking are from a different time interval. Another complicating factor is that we don't show every backlink on Google; we only show a subset of the backlinks we have internally. [One of the things we needed to do on our webmaster pages revamp was to go back and make sure it's clear that we only show a sampling of the backlinks we know about, not all backlinks.] The snapshotting + asynchronous nature + subsampling actions means that it's pretty hard to trace the reason for a ranking change back to a particular exported view of backlinks or PageRank. This is an area where I wouldn't read as much into the particular backlinks or PageRank that you see at any particular instant in time. Also, if a backlink or PageRank external update happened at the same time as ranking changes, I wouldn't read too much into how closely in time they happen together.
Just as a guide for people who don't eat and breathe WebmasterWorld, we typically show new backlink sample sets every 3-5 weeks or so. We have a bank of machines that computes PageRank continuously (and continually, I suppose; I wasn't an English major), but we only export new visible PageRanks every 3-4 months or so.

[Linkster]

BTW - for those of you really interested in getting past all of the BS that flies around the different boards out there from self-made SEOs - this is a good link to bookmark as that rep from Google put to rest a lot of myths:
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum30/29720-1-30.htm

I know we've posted this before but its good to re-read it occasionally just to put to bed the rumours

[natalie]

omg a useful seo thread with no spam from someone who's only purpose is to sell his services! Thank you for giving this info Linkster. Personally I think Webmasterworld is an excellent resource, Punaniman is a big contributor there and always making me read stuff from it. (oh and no he doesnt use the name Punaniman there lol cos its for his mainstream biz)

[Linkster]

natalie - thats ok - I dont use my name over there either