Who do you use as a search engine submission service? Do you find it worth your money?

http://www.simplesubmit.com

I find it very much worth the money. :cool:

I was talking more along the lines of say a coporate submission service like www.bcentral.com offers.

www.bcentral.com is good, but you will have to pay yahoo, altavista, and others if you want get listed

JayC runs a search engine consulting service & has some special deal going on at the moment I think - he posted it in this thread

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=70950

Based on the posts JayC makes on WHT - he clearly knows SEO

Stuff like BCentral etc is just going to be a waste of money in my opinion.

As a novice SEO, JayC definately knows his stuff. Those deals are also very good.

Originally posted by NovaW
JayC runs a search engine consulting service & has some special deal going on at the moment I think - he posted it in this thread

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=70950

Based on the posts JayC makes on WHT - he clearly knows SEO

Stuff like BCentral etc is just going to be a waste of money in my opinion.
Why do you think bcentral is a waste of money?

how about ineedhits.com?

Why do you think bcentral is a waste of money?bCentral's search engine submission offering is essentially a repackaging of Inktomi submission -- you're paying to get specific pages into the Inktomi database, which means most importanly MSN search. Ink used to feed AOL as well, but they've switched to Google as their source. They also add in a group of free submissions; which frankly and in my opinion aren't important at all. The value in the service is the Inktomi placement (granted the value of Inktomi is questioned by many these days, primarily in view of their loss of the AOL contract. But compared to other paid placement options, it is quite cheap). The language at bCentral about "guaranteed*" listing and checking your site for updates every 48 hours are Inktomi services.

So, if you were to submit to Intomi through services like SureList or Positiontech, you'd pay $39 for the first url and $25 for each additional -- a bit less than you'd pay at bCentral ($49 for one url, $99 for three). There are other sources where you can get even better prices for paid Inktomi inclusion than the lower ones mentioned above. bCentral also includes some reporting on your positioning, the automated "Readiness Check," etc... if you think those things are worthwhile they might be worth looking at -- but of course those services are available elsewhere and some people have little faith in automated optimization, preferring to have humans look their pages over.

As a matter of personal taste, though, someone might find the bCentral interface to be superior... so that might weigh into the decision as well. Personally, I have no complaints with the SureList interface, which is what I always use.

As nin mentioned, none of these options will get you into Yahoo, AltaVista, dmoz, etc.

So, bottom line, I wouldn't go as far as to say bCentral is a "waste of money," but as in choosing any service there are a number of factors to be considered in determining where your best value can be found.

Why do you think bcentral is a waste of money?

Bcentral as JayC mentioned is just going to submit to Inktomi at a markup price, but this isn't SEO. Actually after re-reading your initial post you weren't asking about SEO - just submission services. Assuming though that the goal is to get some ranking in the search engines - Inktomi submission is going to do nothing much - I doubt you'd get even 1 hit.

Unfortuanately web hosting is a very tough item to get into the search engines just due to the competition & the fact that most webhost sites are not necessarily the best fit for good placement. Taking google as an example - with > 3million results for web hosting - the first 20 results is the top 0.0007%. Beyond the first 20 you won't get much traffic.

So to take advantage of search engines you would need a comprehensive plan that would take at least 3 - 6 months to show fruit, maybe longer & would probably target various web hosting related phrases. This type of work needs a SEO consultant (or a steep learning curve - there is no reason why somebody cannot do all this themselves - it's not rocket science, just a lot to learn). In the end of course there would be no guarantees, but there isn't many with other marketing methods either & if successful the ROI should be attractive.

Originally posted by NovaW
Assuming though that the goal is to get some ranking in the search engines - Inktomi submission is going to do nothing much -Quite true. One reason is simply that Inktomi, because of some specific policies, is quite spam-filled. To take your regular non-optimized pages and toss them in there with masterful spam gateway pages in a competitive area like web hosting isn't likely to accomplish much in the way of positioning.

If that's what was meant by "a waste of money," in fact, I agree with Andrew that it may well be. They'll do what they say they'll do... but there may be little return on your investment.

Pure submission really isn't very worthwhile, or even necessary here in late-2002 anyway. There are only a few search engine/directory databases to get into and there's a lot of cross-feeding -- the situation has change a lot in the last 18 to 24 months. Submit to and be placed in dmoz and optionally Yahoo, and you'll probably be everywhere within a few months. Even Inktomi has begun spidering more frequently of late... so your pages will probably end up there eventually (maybe 4-6 months, though) even without paid spidering.

Interesting points guys, thank you. Do you feel it's worth spending the $200 per search engine to get in places like Yahoo and AltaVista?

Yahoo is $299 - they would likely give you the title of "echolima web services" - so you might have some chance to get picked up for "Web Services" which is not a big search phrase. You have a decent google pagerank, Yahoo seems to use it as a factor in the rankings.

Being in Yahoo has some general search engine benefit - so overall it might be worth it, but it's touch and go. As part of an overall SEO strategy it would be a good element in the plan. Did you submit to DMOZ yet? - that's free & a big plus to be in.

Altavista will spider your site anyway - especially if you are in Yahoo / DMOZ, but they have an express inclusion program for $49 I think - not really worth it though, Altavista is not very popular.

Did you redesign your site? I seem to remember it was green before - but maybe I am just going nuts.

Originally posted by NovaW
Yahoo is $299 In case anyone doesn't know, what Andrew is saying is that Yahoo is now $299 per year. So certainly not cheap, but there are many, many situations in which it's a worthwhile investment -- and plenty of sites in there that get nothing at all out of it. It all hinges, really, on what directory heading you get listed under, and what site title and description you end up with.

There are some odd things happening at Yahoo right now. If I had a site I was thinking of submitting, I'd probably hold off for a while and see how it all plays out and whether the rankings in the directory might be affected.

Originally posted by NovaW
Yahoo is $299 - they would likely give you the title of "echolima web services" - so you might have some chance to get picked up for "Web Services" which is not a big search phrase. You have a decent google pagerank, Yahoo seems to use it as a factor in the rankings.

Being in Yahoo has some general search engine benefit - so overall it might be worth it, but it's touch and go. As part of an overall SEO strategy it would be a good element in the plan. Did you submit to DMOZ yet? - that's free & a big plus to be in.

Altavista will spider your site anyway - especially if you are in Yahoo / DMOZ, but they have an express inclusion program for $49 I think - not really worth it though, Altavista is not very popular.

Did you redesign your site? I seem to remember it was green before - but maybe I am just going nuts.
Thank you for your advice. I've never even heard of DMOZ so what is it exactly? Yes we did redesign our site, you like?

Originally posted by netsolutions

Thank you for your advice. I've never even heard of DMOZ so what is it exactly?

http://dmoz.org/

The Open Directory Project is the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors.

;)

Dmoz is what nin quoted. Having your site in Dmoz could affect your SE ranking by quite a fair bit. The whole process of getting your site into Dmoz is very similar to Yahoo however - and may take several months. Once difference is it's free :)

The only submittion services that are good in my opinion are the ones done manually. All the automated ones barely work at all.

Originally posted by Omni
Dmoz is what nin quoted. Having your site in Dmoz could affect your SE ranking by quite a fair bit. The whole process of getting your site into Dmoz is very similar to Yahoo however - and may take several months. Once difference is it's free :) Few people really search at dmoz, but the important thing about dmoz/Open Directory is that their listings are used in other places -- most importantly, the Google Directory. Google also uses those directory listings as a starting point for spidering, so once you're in dmoz you'll soon be in Google.

The dmoz listings are readily available for free to anyone else who wants to use them on their site, so there are plenty of "dmoz clone" directories around. The value of these either for direct traffic sources or link pop purposes is pretty limited, but they don't hurt either.

I think that one of the most respectable and easiest ways would be to use selfpromotion.com. It takes a little longer than automatic submit, but it's very effective and it doesn't cost you anything.

Boris