dotWeavers follows a unique service delivery methodology to fill the gaps of online service delivery model with blend of available communication channels.

Search Engines or email trappers for SPAM?

Ans.

Many companies claim to submit your website to 1000's of sites. What they don't tell you is that most of those sites have no other purpose than to collect email addresses so they can flood your inbox with spam mail. Submission to low quality search engines is likely to increase the quantity of spam email you receive, but not the amount of business.

Human vs Robot traffic?

Ans.

Search engines have to read your web pages in order to add them to their index. So, it makes sense that if you submit to thousands of search engines, and they each read most of your web pages, your 'traffic' figures will go through the roof.

Submitting to 1,000’s of search engines will only increase the spider traffic to your site, not the real human traffic and not the amount of business you do as a result. Increased spider traffic can actually slow your site down, resulting in lost customers and lost sales, as well as generate excess bandwidth that costs you money.

Did they give you 1,000 Search Engines list?

Ans.

Unless they provide the complete list by category, it is the time to show them the door.

How many FFA sites are there in that list?

Ans.

A FFA (free-for-all) website is a webpage that consists of a long list of websites, and allows anyone to add their own website (with a description) to the list. People add sites to the list because they think it will increase traffic to their site and earn more money from advertising or sales. This generally does not occur, as the only people who view FFA sites tend to be other webmasters. Most FFA sites are run merely to collect email addresses that can be sold, then sent unsolicited mail.

A likely result: Your name gets on email spam lists, lower ranking to your website by search engines or likely ban.

Are there really 1,000+ Search Engines?

Ans.

There aren’t that many companies effectively.

Many companies own more than one search engine. For example, parent company for Lycos and Hotbot are same and uses the same database. Yahoo owns Overture, AltaVista.

Many search engines own one search engine per country and list a website in only one of them. For example, Google has google.com, google.co.in, google.ca, etc. For the count, it is 3, but for submission purpose, it is just one, since it lists your website in only one, not in all.

Did you check how many of those Search Engines accept free submission?

Ans.

Note that, not all search engines accept free submission. Many of them are by per URL fee ONLY. Example, Lycos, Overture. Many search engines do not accept any submission at all, since they’re powered by one of the major search engines such as Google. For example, MSN is powered by Overture. AOL is powered by Google.

Many of those search engines are either specific to their country and specialised ones, such as lawyers, medical, etc. So, what benefit you are going to get by submitting to a search engine that is not relevant to your business?

Submission does NOT mean listing

Ans.

As far as they are concerned, they may submit (if 1,000’s of search engines really exists), and they’ve fulfilled the promise and get their fee. But they will NOT be listed at all since they do not follow the criteria of those search engines.

For example, how a Russian SE will accept a Hyderabad website? How a Medical SE will accept a Jewellery shop website? How a Chinese SE that is in Chinese language will accept an English website? Even if get into it somehow, how it will do any good to your website?

95% of the traffic comes from Major SEs

Ans.

It's the top engines for each country that generates over 95% of the search engine traffic. Therefore, the key to gain traffic to your site is not how many no-name engines you submit to, but submission to major engines and achieve high rankings. Do you want to put your efforts on the major search engines that generate 95% of the quality traffic or 100s of other search engines that generate less than 5% of the non-quality traffic altogether?

Submitting alone doesn't guarantee visitors

Ans.

Submitting your web site to search engines is important, but it is not the most important step in your search engine marketing campaign.

It's much more important that your web pages are optimized for search engines. Many web sites are designed in a way that prevents them from showing up in search engines.

If your web pages are not search engine ready, it's pointless to submit them. If the search engines index your web site at all, it will be listed on position 17,352 or worse. With a listing on that position, you won't get any visitors.

Re-submission to improve ranking

Ans.

Another submission myth is that you must re-submit your site every day/ week/ month to improve ranking. That is simply not true. It annoys many search engines, which like to decide for themselves how often to revisit your site. Unless majority of your website is changed, you should not resubmit to search engine. Other search engines like to know when you've removed or added a page, but to constantly just resubmit your home page URL is more likely to get you banned from search engines than to deliver good results.

Is it possible to manually resubmit every month?

Ans.

Let us to the minimum math and find the realty.

Did they promise you the search engine submission results report every time they submit it? If not, how do they guarantee that it is submitted?

As you, every one and I agree, you are not the only customer to that company. They may already have or will have hundreds of customers. That is the realty. Let us say, they have 100 customers.

If they want to submit all 100 websites once a month to 1,000 search engines, how much time it takes? Let us assume 5 minutes per site per search engine since many search engines need the submitter to go through several pages and fill at least one big form. It comes to 1,041 eight-hour shifts ((100 x 1,000 x 5)/60/8). Since these need to be submitted every month, all these submissions must be completed in 30 days, so, they need to engage 35 people to do this task alone (assuming 8-hour shifts with no breaks).

Assuming, they charge an average of 10,000 per site per year, it translates to 2,380 PM salary [(100 customers x Rs 10,000) /12 months/35 operators].

Remember, we did not add additional operators required to cover leaves, profit to the company, employee benefits, administration overhead, and most importantly, the cost of the initial website optimisation which is done by search engine specialists. So, if some one promise that they manually submit to 1,000 search engines every month, isn’t it too good to be true?

Did they say they’d use automated tools?

Ans.

There are many automated search engine submission tools available in USA. They can do hundreds of submissions per hour. You may ask, “Why can’t the offering companies or I use those tools”? The answer is, yes they can if they want. What would be the final result? Your website is most likely going to get banned by search engines forever as soon as search engines find that automated tools were used.

What Google guidelines say about automated tools?

http://google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html

"Don't use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our terms of service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.”

Initially your website may get listed. Once search engine finds it, it may remove your website forever, i.e., they won’t list it again no matter what you do. Are you ready for that risk?

God himself doesn’t guarantee, but the priest guarantees!!!

Ans.

First, no search engine in this world guarantees even inclusion of a website, forget about ranking. Some search engines like Yahoo charges about $300 fee per year, still they do NOT guarantee the inclusion and the fee is non-refundable. Again, forget about ranking, we are talking about just inclusion.

So, if the search engines themselves do NOT guarantee the inclusion itself, and clearly states so in writing, how come these 3-party companies guarantee, that too on the first page of the results?

If they can offer first page guarantee, that means, they can do the same for any company for any keyword. There are crores of websites that are looking to be on the first page of the results, and if this company can guarantee first page, how come they are unable to approach crores of companies around the world? What they are doing here in Hyderabad? They must be working in USA or UK and minting money is pounds or dollars. Isn’t it? There are companies who are willing to spend any amount to be in the first page.

Did they come to you with the first page-ranking offer, or they discussed with you on the targeted keywords before giving the offer? If it is prior, it sounds like a doctor offering a guaranteed recovery to a patient without even examining the patient.