Submitting your website to search engines is the first and the most basic step a webmaster takes to get the word out about his/her new website. There was a time when this was a very long and tedious process, where one had to go through many different search engines, and submit their websites manually, but now there are many services, which promise that they will automatically submit your website, for a low cost, thereby saving you a lot of time and hassle. So are their claims genuine? Should you go with them? Or is it better to do this boring and tedious job manually? This article aims to answer these questions.

¡§We will submit your website to 10,000 search engines for only $30¡¨, ¡§Get listed in 1000 search engines for only $15¡¨, these are the sort of claims you would have probably read on many websites, offering search engine submission services. It is strictly advised against using such services, due to many reasons, discussed below.

Firstly, there are at the most 10 major search engines, which send 95% of the traffic to all websites, and the other 5% are usually free for all (FFA) search engines, which just take in submissions, and may rank your site at the top for a short period, and will lower your position as soon as a new load of submissions come in. Even if they do send you little traffic it is likely to be untargeted. It is also to be noted that most FFA search engines are topic specific. Another danger with these types of search engines is that your email address is most likely to be sold to third parties and ultimately your inbox filled with spam, and when you are going for a 1000 submissions, there is no way to find out which search engine actually sold your email address.

There are some other services which actually claim to submit your website free to these search engines, now as the saying goes ¡§there is no free lunch¡¨, they purely work with the sole intention of obtaining your email addresses for spam purposes.

Another claim made by some search engine submission services is ¡§we can get you high rankings in major search engines¡¨. This is totally untrue, and impossible. Search engine submission by these services is done by using automatic software, which opens up the site submission page, fills up the form with the help of information provided and submits it. This process has nothing to do with optimizing your website for better rankings. Some of these services also claim that they can get your entire site indexed in only a day. Once again, this is not possible as most search engines have limits on the number of pages that can be submitted to them, in a day. For e.g. with Google you can submit a maximum of five pages per day.