It never ceases to amaze me how many old discredited techniques and actions are still being recommended by people who purport to be experts. So this is the first in an occasional series of pointless things that are not worth the time it takes to think about them let alone to do them. This one was inspired by a thread on a well known business networking site.

Submitting to search engines – don’t do it!!

I can barely remember when it was last even a vaguely good idea to do this. You see there are these things called spiders that go out and find sites every minute of every day – yeah radical stuff eh – and all you need to do is give them one link to a new site or page and they’ll be on it like a rash the next time they crawl the page with the link on it. You’ll be doing this anyway if you have the slightest intention of anyone ever seeing the page so it’s automatic. Hell, Google will sometimes go looking for a site that’s not linked to yet (it may still be in development) because it knows about the domain registration. It’s hard to stop them at times. If you can’t get a new page into the index you’ve got a lot more to worry about than submissions.

I haven’t submitted a site to Google this decade, or Yahoo, and only ever one to MSN when for some reason it was having trouble finding it. And most of my new sites get found within a couple of days at the very most. One was indexed in half an hour because I linked to it from a blog.

And the danger if you don’t stamp out the practice by firmly saying it’s unnecessary is that your clients may themselves submit multiple times and be seen as submission spamming.

So the next time some idiot tries to sell you submission services tell him you’d rather speak to an SEO!