Factsheet: Submitting Your Site to search engines

Generally speaking, submitting your site to search engines in a continuous automated way is not a good idea, and your search engine rating can suffer as a result.

I often receive emails (illegal spam emails usually) from companies that offer to submit our websites to search engines. Usually these offer to resubmit the sites every month, sometimes even more often. For a fee, of course.

Submitting your website once to various sites is a good idea, so that they are aware of it. Most search engines have a 'submit a URL' or 'Add a site' kind of option. Often this will say that either you can pay, and have your site reviewed quickly, or submit for free, and the site will be reviewed for inclusion at some remote future point in time, with no guarantee of inclusion.

You need to decide for yourself, but personally I would always take the free option.

But note that even submitting once is not the best way to get listed by the search engines. The best way is to have a link to your site from a site that is already included. Then when the search engines look at that site, they will find the link to your site and go off and include it.

Of course, if we do prepare a website for you we will do this for you.

Is it worth resubmitting regularly? Current thinking seems to be that it is not. Once a search engine knows about your site, it will come back from time to time anyway for another look. So I would recommend that you find the main search engines once and submit your site, but don't do it repeatedly. But 'current thinking' changes all the time! So take a look at a few site submission specialists and see what they are offering, if you are interested. There is probably no right or wrong answer.