Understanding Search Engine Relationships
by Joe Dolson (February 27, 2006)
There are some issues surrounding the ethics of search engine marketing methods which can be readily understood through an explanation of search engine inter-relationships. The questionable (although seemingly innocuous) method I'm referring to is search engine submission. Many search engine companies will tell you that part of the service they'll offer you is submission to hundred or thousands of search engines. This business of search engine submission is one of those more difficult to discern questionable techniques of SEO you'll inevitably encounter.
I wouldn't exactly call it black hat SEO - some companies may even believe that they're doing you a favor with all these submissions! However, our feeling is that at best this is a pointless exercise and at worst, damaging to your business.
Why is search engine submission pointless?
The vast majority of searches come through just a few search engines - Google, Yahoo and MSN. These three core engines took 81.1% of search engine traffic during November of 2005, according to a Nielsen NetRatings report at Search Engine Watch.
After those big three, there are a few moderately sized engines such as AOL (6.9%), My Way (2.5%), and Ask (2.3%). The remaining 7% of searches are taken up by a variety of small-time engines. So our conclusions this far into the investigation might imply that a submission to search engines would only require submission to about a half-dozen engines to cover 93 percent of traffic!
Nope, not quite.
In fact, it is completely unnecessary to submit your site to any of these engines at all. Although they accept submissions, many (such as Google) will still only index your site if they have found a link to it - and will index your site automatically if they find that link. Yahoo is the only major player where "submission" has a significant meaning - but it is NOT submission to their search engine. Yahoo accepts submissions to their directory for $300. This fee is worth paying because Yahoo's directory is considered to be quite important - but it is not necessary for search engine submission, unless you have no other inbound links to your site.
And what about those remaining search engines? Well, take a good look at search engine relationships. This particular chart maps search engine relationships in the UK, but the essential concept is true everywhere. The search engines share data. In fact, of the major search engines listed above, you should notice that AOL receives data from Google and MSN receives data from Yahoo. If you visited any of the links above, you may also have noticed that My Way contains a little logo next to the search box which says "Powered by Ask" - My Way is tied to Ask. Statistics are very tricky beasts!
There are only a few core sources for indexed data - and once you've been indexed by one of them, the chances that your site will gravitate to more than one is VERY high. Yes, it's true that there are "hundreds or thousands" of search engines - but there are very few reliable sources of search engine data. For more statistics on this issue, Search Engine Watch maintains a page of current statistical reports for the search engine industry.
How can search engine submission be damaging to me?
Simply put, some of these thousands of minor search engines or directories are undoubtedly FFA, or "Free for All" directories. That is, they accept and display whatever most recent links have been submitted. Why is this so bad? Because a free-for-all directory does not serve any human value. Websites which don't serve any human purpose are not what search engines consider valuable - they don't want these sites in their indexes, and they will sometimes penalize the sites receiving links from these sites.
This is an important principle in search engine optimization - sites with no human value are also of no value to a search engine. Hidden text does not help a human visitor, nor do doorway pages, or satellite sites containing nothing but keywords and topical links. Be wary of these types of services!
Knowing what services being offered are truly meaningful is a huge first step in understanding search engine marketing. The most apparently obvious services may not serve any real purpose at all!
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs2.5 License.
Joe Dolson is a web designer and programmer specializing in accessible web design. He's worked as a freelance consultant and designed since the beginning of 2005 and has written extensively at his private business website for accessible web design and in the InterDigital Strategies blog. His main web interests are in accessibility, useability, and ethics.
