Hi,
I hope I'm posting this in the correct forum, its mainly about search engine submission.
I've been told that to get listed on google quickly you can add your link to an alexa top 500 site, is this correct?
I never submit my own sites to search engines as I just let the links come and they eventually crawl my site, but many of my design clients want their site listed quickly, I told the first few that they should just let their site grow, get incoming links and then the search engines will crawl the site, but I got so many requests that I started paying for their sites to be listed within search engines.
Sites such as registereverywhere.com, harveyhosting.com offer listing in major search engines within days, and http://homepage.ntlworld.com/chris.hemming1/google/ offers listing in google within 14 days.
So my question is, how do they do this? I'm currently doing this for free for my clients as they request it and they get annoyed if I don't do it for them, even though I don't agree with submissions like this and I think that natural crawling is better, I'd prefer not to have to pay as much (or pay anything) to offer this to my clients as its costing me money at the moment.
Can anyone help?
Thanks,
John
:)

Well never used a SEO firm and I believe that natural crawling is better .
I heard those companies use some dirty software to do the job so it is better to do your own optimization instead of paying anyone!
Do that then manually submit their sites to every major search engine .
I know a guy who made that for some oen and made google crawle the whole site within 24.
He only made good keywords in the index.html page .
That is my suggestion , avoid using SEO firms . If you start doing it on your way then you will see good results and even try to make it 1st in the search engines.

Yes I totally agree that natural crawling is the best. I don't even manually submit my own sites to search engines (I only submit to directories) as I get links in and the search engines just crawl eventually. I try telling my clients that this is the best way, but they want to see their site in google quickly so I end up using companies like the one's listed above. What do you mean by 'dirty' software? Is it illegal? I don't want to be financing these people anymore, I don't finance them for my own sites, just for my clients when they request it (as they often do). Its probably best that I just stop doing this for my clients, but I was just wondering if there was a legal, cost effective way to do it, I don't sell it to my clients, they request it for free and I end up forking out money to other sites to do it. I care about my clients and don't want to lose them, but it gets me very frustrated when they request it as I like to do natural optimization that allows natural indexing in search engines.

well I read that some where :) . I guess you need to read some SEO articals and I am sure you will get good at it if you try .

Originally posted by sandanista
Sites such as registereverywhere.com, harveyhosting.com offer listing in major search engines within days, and http://homepage.ntlworld.com/chris.hemming1/google/ offers listing in google within 14 days.
So my question is, how do they do this?:) For Google, they don't have to do anything -- well, maybe they use the free submission, but most sites will be listed within 14 days anyway with the way Google is currently crawling and continuously updating. Pretty nice, selling as a service something that's going to happen anyway -- wonder what I can charge to make the sun come up tomorrow. :)

Other sites, pretty much the same thing. It used to be that a lot of the paid submission places paid the minimum amount to put one page of a site into Inktomi, which offered spidering and listing within 48 hours for $39 (and those companies that chose to be affiliates of one of the partners would pay less, allowing them to make a little on it). But Inktomi is no more, so that dodge isn't available.

But now Yahoo also has a free submission page, but will most likely have you listed within two weeks anyway (and supplies results to AltaVista, MSN, and others). Google results are listed on AOL, so getting in Google within two weeks satisfies that requirement, and Ask/Teoma doesn't accept submissions at all -- again, their spidering will generally get a site listed within that time.

I see, well I was trying to persuade my clients that the best thing to do was to just let the search engines crawl, but some guy had used these services before and asked me if I could do anything similar. They're all repeat clients and they seem to be in contact with eachother because immediately the first request came, the rest started flooding in. Their request was actually to be listed within 3 days, like registereverywhere.com and harveyhosting.com but I talked to someone and they said that although the other site gives 14days as a guarantee, they actually get listed in google within about 24hours (this isn't crawled but indexed). So to provide listings within 3 days I ended up using these services, which was a real pain!
I think what I'm going to do is write an article and send it to all my clients outlining the benefits of natural search indexing. I didn't know google was indexing so fast nowadays. Last time I made a site it took around a month to appear, though that was an improvement on previous times. I'm only asking now because I have 6 design projects on the go, for the same group of clients and I'd prefer not to pay again.
So what these guys (registereverywhere, harveyhosting etc.) are doing is just manually submitting to search engines and the results appear in 3 days?

Recently, I published a site and watched in awe and disbelief as it climbed into the #1 spot on Google and Yahoo in less than 36 hours! Now, the desired search terms are fairly specific - Google returns about 1000 sites and Yahoo returns roughly 68,000. But #1 out of 68k in less than two days?

Google recovered a few weeks later, settling the site into the #4 spot and keeping it there ever since (about four months) - a very comfortable position, I think :)

Now, maybe it's coincidence, but this is the only site I've hand-submitted to a full array of major and obscure SEs for inclusion, and it seems to have paid off. I've posted the following link a few times here - it's the one that explains hand-submission and gives you some tools to get you jumpstarted: http://www.wordsinarow.com/wheretogo.html

I used this page exclusively when I hand-submitted, and the results were stupifying. Now, I don't know for sure this is what did it, but I do know that it didn't hurt me!

If someone insists on you spending the time to do submissions, charge them for your time (1-2 hours should do it). This assumes you charge by the hour or quote by the project, instead of offering packages. Then be prepared to discuss paid inclusion with customers. Sometimes, this is a very good idea, and many companies benefit from reserving $300-1000 every year as an online marketing budget specifically for this reason.

Lastly, make sure you manage your clients' expectations well. For example, if you design a site for a Web hosting company, they should know that no amount of site optimization and free submission will get them a high ranking for the term "Web hosting." That's just how it works. When you pick up new customers, do a little research into how much online market saturation exists in their chosen fields and try to estimate the customers' needs upfront.

Originally posted by the_pm
Recently, I published a site and watched in awe and disbelief as it climbed into the #1 spot on Google and Yahoo in less than 36 hours! Now, the desired search terms are fairly specific - Google returns about 1000 sites and Yahoo returns roughly 68,000. But #1 out of 68k in less than two days?

Google recovered a few weeks later, settling the site into the #4 spot and keeping it there ever since (about four months) That hasn't been an umcommon occurence at Google, as you probably know -- though it was much more common a few months ago than it is right now. Google was showing a strong preference for "fresh" pages, and would seeminglly give new sites a good boost for a couple of weeks, after which they'd move to a more "natural" position.

But while you apparently saw that approach in effect, it no longer seems to be Google's approach. As of the last month or so something different is going on with new sites and/or regarding what appears to be a rapid accumulation of incoming links (as would tend to be the case with new sites, going from "zero" to whatever they end up with). What's commonly happening now with a new site is that it will still rank well at launch, then drop completely out of the rankings after a week or two... and hopefully in time climb back up.

In SEO circles this is commonly being referred to as the "sandbox effect." If you do a search for that term you'll find a lot of speculation on exactly what's going on, but the bottom line is that it hasn't been happening long enough yet for any of us to really fully understand it.

Yes, I've been reading through highrankings forum and webproworld forum and I've read about the sandbox effect. I haven't made a site for a while because I've been pretty busy with other things so I haven't submitted to search engines even before google's florida update. My clients don't expect a high search engine ranking, they just want to be indexed (which is one of the major problems I had with doing this, I would have much rather spent time optimizing their sites and getting it a natural ranking because whats the point in being listed in a search engine if you're ranked 5000th??). As their request have become more of a common occurance I have started working the payed submissions into my pricing, however, taking your advice I think I will do manual submissions myself and work this into my pricing.
Thanks
John

I dont know about other services, but I have used registereverywhere.com for two of my clients, with brand new websites that I made, that had no incoming links to them, and both the sites got listed on Google, and Yahoo in about 2 days. I am not sure how they do it, but it worked for me. I charged my clients $299 for search engine listing service, and signed up their sites through registereverywhere and made a nice chunk of change. Plus I got to use their broken links checker on the site, and their website monitor which is basically a robot that is hitting my sites every 15 minutes to make sure they are up. The downside to them is that they are in the West Coast. Me being in the East Coast, I have to wait until noon just to make a call in to them.

We also require to get lots of backlinks to our site to enhance google pagerank / PR. Link from a higher page rank / PR like PR5 or PR6 is always better. Once we have good PR for our site and site with proper metatags and content, then the website should be in top rankings.