It’s a known fact that there are many snake oil salesman in the SEO industry – there’s nothing surprising in that statement. What I do find surprising is the number of “reputable” firms offering services that are going to do next to nothing to help websites increase their organic search traffic.
Search Engine Submissions
Search Engine Submission is to SEO what this performance is to great moments in musicianship – a slap in the face. Search engines follow links. If your website has any prominent links pointing to it, it will get crawled. Whether or not Google deems it worthy to be indexed is another matter entirely.
Here’s a little trick: type “site:yourdomain.com” into Google. Does your homepage show up? Then Google already knows about your website and re-submitting is not going to make any difference. Google itself says “We do not add all submitted URLs to our index, and we cannot make any predictions or guarantees about when or if they will appear.” And “Only the top-level page from a host is necessary; you do not need to submit each individual page. Our crawler, Googlebot, will be able to find the rest. Google updates its index on a regular basis, so updated or outdated link submissions are not necessary.”
Simple right? Not if you listen to some of our well-known competition: “Submitting your website to search engines may sound like a simple task. But the process is complicated, and if done incorrectly, could cause serious repercussions” and “Submitting to search engines is not a one–time task. What was considered an important factor for ranking highly yesterday, may mean nothing tomorrow.”
There are thousands of search engines that you can submit to, but you already know which ones have the market share – and they all work the same way. Once your website is crawled, submitting it once or submitting it 10 times over isn’t going to do anything.
Think about it logically for a moment, how useful would any search engine be if it was dependent on manual submission by people to keep track of new or outdated webpages? Any such search engine would be a relic overnight. Search Engine Submission is just another way for SEO firms to extract your cash with a phantom service.
XML Sitemaps
From Google: “Sitemaps provide additional information about your site to Google, complementing our normal methods of crawling the web. We expect they will help us crawl more of your site and in a more timely fashion, but we can’t guarantee that URLs from your Sitemap will be added to the Google index. Sites are never penalized for submitting Sitemaps.” The key word there is complementing.
While an XML Sitemap is useful, there are definitely other things you can focus on that will make a much greater impact on your organic search performance. What’s the view from some of the prominent SEO firms out there? “Product X works by crawling and documenting all the pages, in a website, which is especially important for large, dynamic and catalog sites…Product X then sends this collected information directly to Google…Every webpage has organic sales potential, and it’s vital for overall online performance to get all relevant pages in front of potential customers. Product X makes sure this happens.”
This is concerning to me on a number of levels. First of all, there are a number of free tools out there that will do the very same thing. Additionally, Google themselves say that Sitemap submission does not guarantee inclusion in the index. Finally, we’re simply talking about inclusion in the index, meaning the webpage is available to show up for a user search - if the page itself is not optimized properly then it’s never going to be deemed relevant for a user search.
Do we create /submit XML Sitemaps for our clients? Yes. Do we position it as something that is going to explode their natural search traffic? No. Nor do we position it as a stand-alone service.
When so-called “reputable” firms push this bill of goods, it only adds to the confusion in the SEO marketplace. Even worse, it opens the door to the even more outrageous claims that the real fly-by-night outfits thrive on.
Questions or comments? Feel free to leave them here or check out Reprise Media folks on Twitter.
