Search engine submission

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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.

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[edit] 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/)


[edit] Sitemaps

Google Sitemaps was introduced in June 2005 so web developers could publish lists of links from across their sites[1]. The sitemap is used to make the search engine aware of the site and the pages on the site.

As of 2007 XML sitemaps are supported by Google, Yahoo, Ask.com, MSN. The location of the Sitemap can be specified using a robots.txt file to help search engines find the Sitemaps.

[edit] 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.[2] In addition, the remaining search engine submission services have been seen trying out alternate business models, leading to web server attacks on the submitted domain names.

[edit] References

  1. ^ Sitemaps-0.84
  2. ^ Are Search Engine Submission Services Worth It?. webpronews.com (July 27, 2004). Retrieved on 2007-06-09.

[edit] See also