Search Engine Marketing Blog

Monthly Submissions

There are two schools of thought about the frequency for submission of web page URL’s to search engines and directories. One group says that web pages should be submitted frequently, even monthly to all the major search engines because the search engines such as Google drop as many as 60% of URL’s each month in order to make way for updated web listings. Proponents of monthly submission state that it keeps your URL at the top of Google’s index list. Another reason for monthly submission is that it reminds you to update and check links, content and structure of your website on a regular basis. Finally, with most sites except for Google going to a pay per click, pay for ranking, pay for listing, monthly submissions are required to keep your web pages in the indexing queue.

Many of the search engine optimization and ranking companies offer package deals at various levels promising to submit your web pages monthly for an entire year to x number of search engines. These submission packages range in cost from $49 to hundreds of dollars per year. Generally the paid inclusion sites cost up to $300 per website per year.

When you look at the other side of the picture, there is a preponderance of anecdotal and logical evidence that monthly submission not only are not necessary, they are not recommended for a number of reasons.

First, if your web site is submitted once to the top three web search engines, including Google, Yahoo Panama and MSN Search, you will be reaching over 95% of all web searches. You should think about it and determine if the efforts to reach 5% of the web surfers are really worth the cost.

Second, submitting a large number of web pages from one IP address during a short period of time can result in the search engine spider regarding your web site as spamming the internet and could result in your being banned from submitting at all.

Next, submitting a website for indexing through one of the ‘pay for submission’ programs does not necessarily mean your web site will be accepted and indexed. Even it is is, there is no guarantee that the indexing will occur in a short time frame. And if you are accepted and indexed, there are no guarantee that your ranking will be high enough to do you any good.

Since building content rich web pages with good quality links to high performance sites will get your web pages noticed quickly by the search spiders, and since Google is a high link focused search engine, you should follow this submission schedule for your web pages.

 Submit your finished and polished pages ONCE to the search engines. This can be to the free submission services. The search engine spiders will find your site either way, and once found they will not forget to visit you in the future. Essentially, that’s all a submission is–an invitation to the search engine spider to visit your site and review it.

 If you need to make significant changes in your website, you can resubmit but not more often than once or twice monthly. Spiders don’t check your site more often than that anyway.

So, the bottom line is don’t submit your URL’s monthly. Use your time and money to revitalize your content pages and to avoid unfinished sites which affect the health of the search engine spider.

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