I can finally officially declare that all search engine submission services are now scams. If you receive an email from anyone claiming to offer search engine submission services or a similar submission service–it is spam and also a scam.
In a recent Google Webmaster Forum thread, a Google representative officially stated:
these services are not needed and can even be counter-productive
Yes, search engine submission is officially dead–and officially a scam.
Take a look at the UCE (Unsolicited Commercial Email–spam) email that I received just recently, it looked like this:
The email is offering “search engine submission services” and the service, which costs a hefty $75.00 per year provides “submission and search engine ranking for domain owners”. The offer goes on to say:
Failure to complete your search engine registration by Nov 10, 2012 may result in the cancellation of this order (making it difficult for your customers to locate you using search engines on the web).
Sure, they want you to reply and pay for their “service” by a certain date. But [b]it is absolutely a false and misleading statement[/b] when they say that “it will make it “difficult for your customers to locate you using search engines on the web”. That statement is not only misleading, it is WRONG. Let me make it very clear, here:
You do NOT have to submit your web site to the search engines. The search engines have been crawling and indexing web sites without any issues whatsoever for many years now. Submitting to search engines stopped being effective over 10 years ago. The best way to get your web site indexed properly in the search engines is to get links from other web sites to your web site. Furthermore, I have actually proven that within minutes of registering a new domain name, Google will visit your web site, in an attempt to crawl its pages and index the content. That’s without having to submit your URL to a search engine.
If you’d like further proof that search engine submission is dead and now a scam, Search Engine Roundtable just recently wrote about the fact that Google officially says that web site submission services can harm your web site’s search engine rankings:
John from Google said, yes, it may, it may have a negative impact. Why? John explained that it can lead to a tremendous number of unnatural links for your site. As you know, unnatural links can more than ever have a negative impact on your site. Despite the concerns with negative SEO, this is the reality we live in these days.
Again, there is no need whatsoever to submit your web site to the search engines anymore, and I am officially calling “search engine submission” a scam.
Update: It’s amazing, after two years of writing this post, I’m still seeing “search engine registration” types of scams out there. Seriously, you do not need to submit your site to a search engine. Unless, of course, you intend to pay for traffic to your website. For example, if you want to sign up for Google AdWords, you would need to sign up and give them your credit card to pay for clicks to your website. But if you want that ever-sought-after free search listings, you do not need to pay.
