Your web site is finally online. Congratulations! And your webmaster confirms that your site was submitted to the search engines. Excellent. The next day you check a few search engines, and you can't find your site. A week later, and you are still nowhere. "Something must be wrong!" you exclaim.

The plain truth is that search engines can take months to include (or update) your web site. And directories like Yahoo can take even longer. (See Search Engine Myth #3: Yahoo Is A Search Engine)

You might think that because search engines are a bunch of powerful computers, they should be able to process the submission of your web site almost instantly. Unfortunately, the reality is that they are far, far from being instant. It's not uncommon for search engines to take several months (or more) to include your site.

Here is selection of direct quotes about search engine submission delays, excerpted over time from respected industry researchers and analysts (email me for sources):

About Excite: "It appears to us that the majority of Excite was compiled 4 months ago with very few changes being made since then. Sooner or later the mainstream press will report on how out-of-date some of these search engines are getting and it'll become a PR nightmare for them."

About WebCrawler: "Last known index change: 5 months ago."

About Lycos: "Last Updated: 3 months ago - currently only seeing minor changes to index. Time to Index: In the past its been 90+ days although we believe they may be getting faster."

About Inktomi: "Inktomi is still taking forever to add new sites..." (Inktomi "powers" many top search engines.)

Regarding search engines in general: "HotBot and AltaVista are somewhat up to date and you should see some results within a month. The other engines are a lot slower so they make take up to several months to get indexed..."

(Note: The submission delay times noted above are all subject to change. Remember, search engines can and do change constantly. See Search Engine Myth #5: Some Experts Know Exactly What Search Engines Are Looking For)

A few years back there was one or two search engines that added your web site instantly upon submission. But no more! Those poor search engines were pounded by webmasters, submitting and resubmitting, making changes and resubmitting, over and over and over. "Enough!" those search engines cried, and they did away with including sites immediately. Those days are over.

The truth is, you don't pay a cent to get your web site in a search engine. Submissions are free. Since you aren't paying them, search engines are under no obligation to include your web site in their system -- immediately, tomorrow, next week, next month, or ever. Yes, they need you, because people go to search engines to find other web sites, but they'll include you according to their own time schedule, not yours! They already have more web sites in their system than you can imagine. Your web site is just one more little addition that will neither make nor break them.

You have to have patience when it comes to anything regarding search engines. Take solace in the fact that you are not alone: Everyone has the same experience. So give your webmaster a break by cutting him or her some slack.

But take note! Another possibility is that your site IS in the search engines -- it's just buried because it's not optimized. Optimizing means tweaking a site in the hopes that you can make it come up well for searches that are important to your business.

How can you find out if your site is buried? Try searching for it using more obscure words or phrases that might be unique to you, such as your full name, your domain name, etc. If you find your site with these obscure searches, and not on the searches that are important to you, then you want to talk to your webmaster not about submissions, but about optimization. If this is the case, I'd start over from the beginning with Search Engine Myth #1: Meta Tags Are Important. Good luck!

Published: January 18, 2001

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