“Submit to 10,000 Search Engines” or “Submit to over 200,000 Search Engines”. This kind of ads should attract customers. It looks great to submit to so many search engines. Submission software is offered that helps to submit hundreds of websites to hundreds of search engines during several hours. What is a realistic, possible result of all these nice tools? The achieved link popularity is near Zero, but the mail box is filled by the autoresponders from the mass of FFA (Free for all) search engines.

Which Search Engines count?

Only a few of the many search engines really count! 99,9 % of all those who go on-line to find something use one of the 18 top search engines. Scrub The Web provides this information in it’s member area. Yahoo, MSN Search and Google are the top three search engines according to Alexa Ranking. Alta Vista and AllTheWeb – also famous search engines - belong to Yahoo and are supplied by Yahoo.

If Link Popularity of a website is measured by the services that provide this information, only the Link Popularity of a website at Google, MSN, Yahoo, AllTheWeb, Alta Vista or Hot Bot is displayed. This shows that only a few search engines really count for Link Popularity. It is not necessary to submit to thousands of search engines, but to the few important search engines in the right way.

Manual work instead of automated submissions

Yahoo search demands that a submitter of websites has to be logged in a Yahoo email address before the submission can start. Submitting to MSN is only possible after typing of a code that is presented in a window. Google says that it is not necessary to submit a site to their search engines. Their spiders crawl the web and can find the websites. Google offers anyway an Add URL page and does not penalize repeated submissions. It seems that Google Sitemaps is a recommendable tool for webmasters to improve the chance that websites get indexed.

Submissions to directories

Submissions to directories result in good quality links to the website. The Open Directory Project is the most important of all directories. It is very difficult to get a site listed in this Number 1 directory. Repeated submissions are necessary. Google favours websites that are listed in The Open Directory Project. The Yahoo Directory comes next but it is expensive. The websites of vilesilencer and trendmetrix list hundreds of good directories. A lot of them are free and of high quality. They are spidered by the major search engines. This high quality links are not only good for boosting the Link Popularity, but of the Google PageRank.

Quality counts

The conclusion is that only the quality of the links counts that can be gained from search engines and directories to the website. Submissions to thousands of search engines are a loss of time and resources. Most of the work has to be done manually. Good results can be achieved, but it is a question of time, rather in months than in a days.