It is commonly thought that all one has to do to submit a site to the search engines is to use some piece of automated submission software. At one time this would have worked, but many major search engines now block automated submissions because these have been abused. Such software can be useful, but for the major search engines, submissions should be done manually. Which are the major search engines to which you need to submit your site? In fact none! They will spider your site so long as they find good incoming links from other sites which they have already indexed. However, you may wish to accelerate the process by submitting your site. Here is a list in rough order of current popularity among UK users as of November 2005* :
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Google. Free submission and sponsored listings available (known as Google "Ad-Words"). Note that there is also a "Google Directory" which is really the
Open Directory Project.
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Yahoo. Free submission available. Also paid-for submission and sponsored listings via Overture, who they own. Yahoo also has a very significant
web directory of their own. There is some indication that Microsoft and yahoo who have no linked will be rebranding this as Bing
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Bing. This used to be MSN Search, but has been rebranded and improved by Microsoft in order to try to keep up with Google.
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Ask Jeeves. No free submission but they will spider your site providing there are links pointing to it from other sites which already appear in their index. They are currently developing their own sponsored listings system for UK users - already available for users in the USA; presently they use Yahoo-Overture and Google AdWords results for their UK sponsored listings.
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Lycos. There have been a lot of changes over the years in terms of where Lycos draw their results, and it is hard to keep track! However, they do not produce their own results so no submission is necessary. But they do offer a means of advertising.
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It is important to keep abreast of which search engines major UK ISPs are using, because when users sign up to an ISP, the ISP's chosen information and search portal is typically set up as the user's home page. As of August 2006 ...
Important: in some cases ISPs filter and / or re-organise results from their search partners.
* Interestingly when I was updating this, I couldn't find anything newer than May 2006. Another fascinating view is search engine popularity by country: see http://www.oxyweb.co.uk/blog/searchenginemapoftheworld.php