Submission Experience

                So this is meant to be a review of my experiences trying to submit the websites I work on to search engines. Though I started this experiment using this blog, which is posted through the third party sites (tumblr.com, wordpress.com, and blogspot.com); I found I was unable to use my blog as a good demo for the search engine submission process. I quickly found that with the two largest search engines (Google and Bing) the way to submit your site is by using their webmaster tools, and to do this you had to be able to alter the header HTML, or create a meta-tag on the site with a specific key – or otherwise modify the site to show the specific key generated for you. This is not readily apparent or easy for you to do with these third party sites. That said there are ways. So far I have only investigated this with the wordpress.com site, but if you install certain SEO plugins they have ways through their options or setting settings menu for you to just input the key generated. The specific plugin I used was the All in One SEO Pack.

                Naver and Daum both serve as phone directories in their respective countries as well as web search engines. So the default URL submission settings include a space where you are supposed to put your phone number, and of course the country area codes are restricted to Asia. In Naver you can just leave the phone number blank and hit submit and it will process just your website. For Daum there are bubble options right before the URL submission box, start clicking them until you find the one that just shows the URL submission box, and hides the phone number box. This is the option to submit just a website; once you have the right button clicked you can submit your website.

                Qihoo 360 Search had a slightly longer form where you also had to submit your email and a captcha. Yahoo gets their search results from Bing, so your use of their webmaster tools covered Yahoo as well, they also pull their directory results from DMOZ so you can submit there to possibly be included in the Yahoo Directory. The rest of the search engines mentioned in my first post on submitting to search engines were extremely easy; basically input the URL and hit go. All told if you are already registed with a Microsoft and Google account, the whole process should take less than 25min. If you have to create new accounts for them however you could easily tack on another 15-30 minutes.

Submitting to Search Engines

            Part of every webmaster's job will be submitting their creations to search engines. Even if you are not a digital librarian directly responsible for submitting your library's site to search engines you may find a buried treasure on the internet that you wish was a whole lot easier to find than it turned out to be. Many librarians then feel this mild case of OCD trying to understand if there is some form of corrective indexing or cataloging you can do to help others more easily find this information in the future. Well yes there is, you can submit these hidden websites to search engines. I found myself wishing that I had thought, or been told to, do this simple step with some of my library class projects.

Submitting a site to a search engine is about more than finding that site. If you prepare a site well enough before submission your site can be listed in the top 10 search results for your relevant keywords – this has become the best way to gain traffic to your sit; beating out some of the classics such as banner advertising.

There are several apparent ways to achieve comprehensive URL submission after first googling the problem. There are a myriad of websites out there, including a good many free ones, which will do this for you. They will submit your site from anywhere from 10-400 search engines. Sounds awesome right? Not really, first of all when looking through these you rarely learned all of the search engines that you would be submitting to. Secondly, these sites did not usually specify how they were submitting your site (many search engines will only take certain kinds of submissions) so there was no way of checking to see if your site was being submitted in a way that actually worked. Finally, many of these sites attempt to submit your site over and over again. This is called spamming your site, and actually gets it blocked or ranked lower in many search engines. Once again it is difficult if not impossible to tell which submission service do this, and which do not. So like many things in life, it turns out that if you want to do this properly, you ought to do it yourself.

Whenever I have read about site submission previously, it has always been written about hand in hand with SEO, or search engine optimization. If you don't know what this is, it is the idea of promoting your site by having it appear near, if not at, the top of the results list when someone types in a relevant search query. It is true that submitting your site is the final step of the SEO process (likely why it is mentioned there), but this process is only something that can really be controlled if you have access to your website's base HTML code. People who have used turnkey solutions, blogs, or have some other sort of preformatted web site you want to submit not have the ability to affect this process in the traditional way. However you may have something in your authoring or control panel that will allow you do things like choose your keywords for your articles – this does filter down into SEO. The main point here though is that I had thought that I would need the traditional information compiled for SEO in order to submit my site. This is not true, you only need your site's URL, and to occasionally prove you are not a robot.

             So now you're ready to submit to search engines, but which search engines do you want to submit to, and how many are you going to submit to? Part of this answer is obvious. If you only want to submit to one engine, by far the most popular search engine in the world is Google. So if nothing else you should submit here. The next question to ask is how global you want your website to be. It is true that Google by itself takes care of the majority of that too; however there are certain countries where Google is not the top search engine. These are: Yahoo! (Japan), Baidu (China), Yandex (Russia), Naver (South Korea), and Seznam (Czech Republic). Next you may want to consider including the runner-ups in your list as well, after all if you include Yahoo! and Bing, you already have the majority of that list covered. There were several search engines that were originally on my list which I ended up excluding because they either: directly used the search results of another search engine already on my list, or did not accept URL submissions at all- they get all of their data directly from their crawling bots. The only way to get included on the latter type of search engines is to ensure that other sites have links that will lead them to your site. Perhaps the best way to do this is to create social media splash pages, or a Wikipedia entry. After all is said and done I ended up with the list below.

 

           

·         Baidu – Baidu Submit

·         Bing – Bing Submit

·         Daum – Daum Submit

·         DMOZ Open Directory Project – DMOZ Submit*

·         Google – Google Submit

·         Naver – Naver Submit

·         Seznam – Seznam Submit

·         Qihoo 360 Search – Qihoo 360 Search Submit

·         Yahoo! - Yahoo! Submit

·         Yandex – Yandex Submit

 

*Unlike the other links this is not the actual submission page, but the submission guidelines and instruction page. To submit properly on DMOZ you have to go directly to the most appropriate category for your page to be filed under and then click on the submit URL link at the bottom of that category's page.