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Submission Services to Steer Clear Of

Before we get started I'll go through some terminology that will be used throughout this article.

Spam - The use of something that is considered "trickery" by the search engines, usually considered junk by the search engines and not tolerated.

Spammer - A person or group that creates spam.

SEO - Abbreviation for the term "search engine optimization" or "search engine optimizer".

SE - Abbreviation for "search engines".

FFA - Abbreviation for "free for all" link sites.

Index - List of sites included within a search engine

Spider - Word used to describe how some search engines include a site, they use a "Spider" which will crawl a page, find a link, and then crawl the page that link led to.

Reciprocal Linking - The trading of links from one site with another in order to gain link popularity and traffic.

You've seen the advertisements, "Free submission to over 85,000 search engines and link directories." Almost too good to be true isn't it? For FREE, your site can be submitted to over 85,000 search engines and link directories and all you have to do is give them your name and email. Great!! Is what most people think when they see these then once they submit their sites they notice a high surge in the amount of email they get. I will not guarantee one thing, accept that if you submit using one of these "free" services, your email will become bulged with junk email adds and campaigns which will cause you to either close your email or to get dropped from your email provider.

What these free submission services actually do is submit your site, along with your email and name, to all the FFA directories they can find. You may be asking yourself, "But what's the big deal, I'll just use a fake email. At least I'll get listed on OVER 85,000 lists." Sorry but the truth is that most of these FFA lists don't keep your link on them for more than a few hours or days if you're lucky. FFA lists work for the people running them. You see FFA sites actually are mass email attractors, what I mean by this is that they obtain thousands of emails for their own use. So what's wrong with that? Well, remember I mentioned having your email stuffed, what these FFA sites do is obtain your email along with everyone else's that submit and they then sell your email information to companies or groups paying for addresses to send ads to. Thus instead of gaining traffic from these FFA sites you usually gain no traffic and have an email full of trash you will never read. In the end FFA sites help you in no way.

Another side affect of these submission methods also has to do with FFA link sites. While you may still think that the problems listed above aren't enough that it couldn't hurt to try, maybe this will help to explain why you shouldn't use these submission services. The FFA links are actually being labeled as spam sites by many search engines. What I mean by this is that many search engines won't index a site they consider to be spam. "So what's that have to do with me, I'm not running a FFA?" Well, the problem is that by having your link on one of these FFA sites your site could be labeled as "spam" by association. If your site would happen to be labeled spam it could end up being very difficult to fix. What some search engines will do with spam is to totally ignore it. So if your site was flagged as spam by the search engines and you then submitted the "legit" way, by hand submitting, it is likely that your sites rating or ranking from the site would be hurt, or even worse, skipped over all together.

The following was taken from the Google page for webmasters and SEOs:

Avoid SEOs that talk about the power of "free-for-all" links,
link popularity schemes, or submitting your site to thousands of
search engines. These are typically useless exercises that do
not affect your ranking in the results of the major search engines.
At least, not in a way you would likely consider to be positive.

The reason your site could be flagged goes down to one of the ways a search engine determines the relevancy of a site, by link popularity. Link popularity is determined by many different factors. The way link popularity is determined is by relevancy of the site/page linking to your own or how well that site relates to your own. Another way is by how high on the page your site is placed, your link is given a higher ranking the higher on the page it is. Something that happens with the link relevancy is that if your site is on a page that has been labeled spam your link relevancy from that site can be rated in the negative sense, in fact it can be given such a rating that it takes down the link popularity you have gained from many other sites.

I am not saying that reciprocal linking is a "bad thing", actually that is a very popular way of web marketing and worth doing, it ads relevancy to your site and hopefully to the site of the person you are trading links with. But, if you are serious about gaining web traffic, DO NOT use a submission service which advertises getting listed on a large number of search engines and link directories. The negatives of using such tactics highly outweigh the positives.