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The only one worth using is on MSN. Google
and Yahoo take for every to get around to manual submissions, and there
are far easier ways of getting into them. To find the MSN submission
page, just search for "submit MSN."
Google
Google has really gone to great lengths
to help you get indexed. If you are updating your site frequently, you
should use the Google Sitemaps tool. The tool is free and gives Google a
direct path for visiting your site on a regular basis. If you don’t
update that frequently, there is an even easier method for getting
indexed.
For Google, the simplest method is to
go to blogger.com and start a blog for your site. This blog platform is
free. Just start writing about anything you wish. Within your ramblings,
create links to pages on your sites. Since Google owns blogger.com, it
will check the site every few days and follow the links to your site.
Once on your site, Google is pretty good about indexing as many pages as
possible.
Yahoo
The company tries to make money by
charging you to be listed in the Yahoo directory, a companion section to
its search engine. Depending on the type of site, this can run a couple
hundred dollars a year with no guarantee of even being ranked! Many
sites bypass this process by trading links with sites already in the
Yahoo directory. Yahoo then follows said links to your site and indexes
it. The beauty of this approach, of course, is no money comes out of
your pocket.
Showing no shame, Yahoo has recently
moved to turn its search engine into one giant pay-per-click engine.
This new program is called "SiteMatch" and has met with a ton of
controversy. Essentially, Yahoo wants you to pay to submit each url of
your site, with prices ranging from $49 for the first one to $29 and $15
for subsequent sub-domains depending on the number of listings. As if
that weren’t bad enough, Yahoo also is demanding that you pay for each
hit these pages get from organic listings! The cost per click is either
30 or 15 cents depending on the type of site. In my humble opinion, this
is a disgraceful move by Yahoo, and I refuse to be held up. You can make
your own choice.
An alternative way to get listed in
Yahoo is to turn your blog into a news feed. You’ll need a free email
account with Yahoo. Take the blog you created for Google and go to a
free feed converter site like Feed Burner. Convert your blog into a news
feed using the free service. This may sound complex, but it is
exceedingly simple once you are on the site.
When the site kicks out your feed
domain, add it to the My Yahoo page associated with your free Yahoo
email account. Just go to the My Yahoo page and click the "add content"
button in the top left. Enter your feed domain where indicated on the
page that appears.
Next, go to a site like PingOMatic and
ping the various blog listing sites out there. My Yahoo is one such
site. Eventually, Yahoo will read the My Yahoo listings and follow the
links in the blog to your site. This doesn’t work as well as it used to,
but it beats paying the SiteMatch fees.
MSN
MSN is very good about hunting down
sites. If it hasn’t found yours, just go to the submit site page
mentioned in the "Submitting?" paragraph at the beginning of this
article. Enter a url and MSN will crawl it within a week or two.
Getting indexed in Google and MSN is
fairly easy if you follow these steps. As to Yahoo, you’ll have to
evaluate whether you want to be part of the shenanigans.
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