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SEO myths and crap; submitting to search engines

By theGypsy | February 11, 2010

A few week’s ago I put a shout out on Twitter for a Poll; What SEO myth’s/crap pisses you of the most? And as often can happen with Twitter I received more responses than I could actually use. Now? I have a good list of SEO myths and crap.

So why not get out the guns, knives and C4 to destroy a few of the more common dung heaps in the SEO world? Right? It seems fitting to get them out of the way while this blog is in the early days of its evolution… for however long the madness lasts..

This is the first post in the ‘Crap and Mythology’ section… there will be more to come…

#1 Submitting to search engines

Oh fuck fuck fuck…. Do I seriously even have to write about this one? I knew this post was a bad idea. Well screw that. I shall just grab a snippet from my post on Search Engine Journal;

“Before we go, I think it is important to note there is a HUGE difference between discovery and indexation. Remember those jackasses charging to ‘submit to the search engines’? Never pay for submission as indexation requires (in most cases) some form of PageRank (link love) being passed to the page in question. This can be external links or internal links, which essentially is what we see with sites with greater authority.

Search engines decide if they are going to index and rank content based on a wide variety of factors from link love to authority and temporal query importance. Simply being discovered is a long way from actually ranking for something meaningful and bringing in targeted referrer traffic”

SEO myths and crap; submitting to search engines

While this is certainly one of the longest running piss-offs for SEOs, it should go without saying that it is total and utter bullshit.

Any SEO worth shit isn’t going to ‘fire and forget it’ with the site or a page on said site. The act of actually optimizing the site/page and building links to it will take care of the indexation. End of story. There is no fucking need to submit to any search engine

Oh and 200 search engines? We’ve seen that one too… there really isn’t much point worrying about a bunch of search engines no one has ever heard of. Any SEO company that sells this service is either trying to rip you off, or showing their total ignorance of the SEO process…
Anyways, there’s Part 1… a no brainer. Feel free (as always) to sound off in the comments!

Look for more Myths and Crap soon!

Topics: Myths and Crap | 26 Comments »

Posted on 11 February 2010 by David Harry

Just a ranting and rambling search geek.... Web gypsy and renaissance man! When not losing what's left o' me mind here, I can be found blogging on the Fire Horse Trail and hanging wid me peeps at the SEO Training Dojo

has written 17 articles for SEO Bullshit

  • http://www.goosh.co.uk/ Kev Strong

    Great post. However, I may incur your wrath in the future as I am currently running some tests on indexation & domain priority through submission with no natural link discovery. I'll ping ya when it's up.

    But back to the rant – I also hate these merchants who promise you will be in 200 search engines in 48 hours – it's so 2000.

  • http://www.alex-moss.co.uk/ @alexmossSEO

    i like you guys – you're alright!

  • http://www.huomah.com theGypsy

    Hey bro… I am all for testing such things… but at the end of the day any proper SEO program with target pages is about RANKING not merely INCLUSION or indexing. It's indexed… so what? The act of ranking a page (and internal architecture) should ensue pages get indexed. Selling a service for it? Crap. And 200+ engines… oh my word… just part of the sales bullshit these types of services use on the poor bastards that don't know any better… sigh…

  • karadawn

    People still try this crap? Seriously? Who even cares about anything other than Google anyway?

  • http://www.huomah.com theGypsy

    Well, I figure there must still be a bit of dosh in it… look at the SERPs;

    http://www.google.com/search?q=submit%20to%20se…

    http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=submit+to+…

    Even the AdSense is fairly covered. There must still be something working out there. And hey, go past SEs and there are a shit load of 'submit to social sites' ones that are now in play. Pathetic really….

  • http://www.google.com/profiles/barry.adams Barry

    Amen. In the words of @RuudHein: “Search consists of 3 parts: retrieve, sort, and show. Of these 3 only 1 matters to us: sort.” (from his guest post on Search Cowboys)

  • http://www.seobegin.com/ Dean Cruddace

    I think this subject touchs on being in the seo space again, there are a lot of businesses out there that will not understand how dated it is and some will be trapped in that crappy never ending circle or even venturing onto rendering bullshit no value visits from traffic schemes.

  • Raidensurfer

    To bloody true, I see far to many of these so called “SEO Companies” or should I say “RIP OF MERCHANTS”…… always avoid somewhere that is telling you that they can index your website in 100,000 search engines… oh yea and to add, ignore those people who tell you that they have inside links with Google and have paid lots of money to them to rank for certain select industries… “Not mentioning no names as of yet” but they will have their judgment day… ;)

  • http://www.fmsseo.com/ Karl

    This has to one of my biggest annoyances that I come across. I've found that some of the people who have been mis-sold such services buy into the fact that it works as they start seeing their site 'naturally' get found in the search results. A real shame.

    Regards,

    Karl

  • http://www.justinparks.com Justin Parks

    These vendors of the “search engine submission service” are some of the lowest sanke oil sales men about. They love this type of thing because they get t oquote massive numbers “submitted to 200 SE's” or “get 1000's of pages indexed by 1000's of Search Engines”. It all sounds complicated, expensive, and important. Its a load of bollocks.

    The other issue of course is that most people loose there minds when they see this and ask “how do I get onto these 197 other Search Engies” when they themselves, and everyone they know, probably only use 1or 2… Google, Bing or Yahoo etc.

    In fact, ask most people and I would be surprised if they could clearly define what a search engine is…you would be astonished when they say “The blue E thing on my desktop that I look at the web on”… any wonder these services still exist today.

  • http://twitter.com/bradleyhunt Bradley Hunt

    One local scumbag will submit your site to “the better engines” and “submit your web site according to their current criteria.” The SERPS around site submission are pretty depressing actually.

  • http://ww.semscholar.com/ David Temple

    So sad that there are more than 1 million searches a month for search engine submission terms and people are making a lot of money selling these useless services. Should retitle this to read SEO Myths, Crap and Total Ripoffs!

  • rishil

    Who do I have to kill around here for a link? http://explicitly.me/small-business-seo-search-…

  • http://rachaelbutts.com/ Rachael Butts

    I totally agree that site submission is BS, but I guess I am a little confused. You are saying not to submit the site to Google at all? I thought that was somewhat important in terms of indexing, and tracking? Maybe I'm retarded and missed the point of the article. :) Love the site btw.

  • http://www.searchenginejournal.com/weekly-search-social-news-02162010/17824/ Weekly Search & Social News: 02/16/2010 | Search Engine Journal

    [...] SEO myths and crap; submitting to search engines – is one of last week’s offerings from new blog ‘SEO Bullsh*t’ which hits one of the longer running crap hat services we all know and love. (by the way, also catch the Webcology appearance). [...]

  • http://www.dkssystems.com/ Nick LeRoy

    It's absolutely ridiculous that people even fall for this today. If you simply ask yourself how many search engines can you list I would be surprised if many get past the big 3. And after you explain that some of the engines such as AOL use Google, it should be even harder for them to come up with more.

    Further more why would anyone even care about Asian search engines. It seems like the firms with “lists” of engines are mainly from Asia. The first thing someone needs to ask is even if they sell their products over seas… of course this is assuming they actually received traffic from one of these “engines”.

  • http://www.justdatingreviews.com/ kara

    ya mean those submit to 200 search engines services don't work. darn! ha.

  • SFAdAgency

    Awesome post. The concept of submitting websites to search engines hasn't been needed since 1998. Doesn't anyone do research anymore?

  • SFAdAgency

    The concept of submitting websites to search engines is BS and hasn't been needed since 1998. Nice post. Great stuff here.

  • chriswestmeyer

    I love the services that will keep submitting your site month after month for $39 per month.

    So, if submitting once was not enough, why not just keep hammering the engines…:-)

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    [...] and you charge people to submit to SEARCH engines? I hope your customer don't read this http://seobullshit.com/seo-myths-cra…earch-engines/ Amazing… god save us from these "SEO companies" flooding the Internet. [...]

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    [...] with a title like "turbo generator Search Engine Submission" or something like that. http://seobullshit.com/seo-myths-cra…earch-engines/ Search engine submission in 2010 is a nice way to scam clients and rip them from their money. [...]

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