Advertisements like this are plastered all over the web: "Submit your web site to 400 search engines for $59!" (Even Microsoft plays this game.) Sounds great, doesn't it? But it is another web myth.

But this one is easy to debunk and it gives me great pleasure to do so. Just ask whoever is hawking this service to provide you with a list of exactly who these hundreds of "search engines" are. You'll probably have trouble getting the list in the first place. If you manage to do this, scan the list. Have you even heard of most of them? I doubt it.

If you haven't even heard of most of these so-called search engines, why would anyone else? They probably haven't either. If most people on the web haven't heard of them, what chance do they have of sending visitors to your web site? Probably none.

A few sites direct most web traffic

The truth is, most web traffic is directed by a small handful of sites. Not 400 sites. Not even 100 sites. Try 10-12 sites. And chances are you've heard of most of them, such as, in no particular order: Alta Vista, Netscape, Excite, etc. All of a sudden submitting to hundreds of search engines doesn't sound so great. (Foreign search engines are an exception. But unless your web site is authored in a language other than English, I wouldn't worry too much about them.)

Even worse, some of these services, while submitting you to scads of what I consider useless search engines, manage to not include all of the top ones. You know - the ones that count! You end up having to go to the ones they left out, and submitting your web site manually. And how do you know - with absolute certainty - that the submissions performed by these services were successful? When you manually submit to search engines, you get a response back - from each - that says something like "Thank You" or "Submission Received".

Doing it manually is the best way anyhow. At my company, we don't touch services like this. One of our search engine engineers submits our clients' web sites manually, one by one. It's the only way to make sure that it's done right. And we only worry about the top search engines. After years of analyzing traffic reports from client web sites, we know that submitting to anything other than the top search engines is a waste of time.

The origins of this myth

So where did this myth come from in the first place? Well, a long time ago, when the web was in its infancy, maybe 4 or 5 whole years ago, there were hundreds, even thousands of people trying to set up search engines and directories of web sites. The market was still wide open, and there weren't a handful of sites dominating things - yet. So back then, it made sense to get your site listed everywhere. But things have changed!

Now there's no harm in using a service that submits you to "hundreds of search engines". But don't be misled! If you don't concentrate on the top search engines, you've just been taken hostage by another popular search engine myth.

David Teefy, of Comstock Net Services, points out that another potentially negative aspect of using these services that purport to submit your web site to tons of "search engines": Spam. Spam is junk email that you never asked for. By spreading your web site around to all these no-name "search engines" of dubious value, you could very well be opening yourself up to receive lots and lots of spam.

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