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Search engines love spam

I just received this bit of spam in my mailbox,
"Have a great web site, but no one knows it even exists?
Get EVERY page of your website indexed by such important Search Engines like:
Lycos, Excite, Gooqle ,Ask Jeeves ,MSN Search ,Yahoo Search ,lnktomi ,AOL Search, Overture ,WebcrawIer ,HotBot ,etc. Getting EVERY paqe of your website relisted every 2-3 months wiIl expose your site to extra traffic. "

It makes my stomach turn to think of how many people will fall for it.

Everywhere you turn someone is telling you about something you MUST do for your site to succeed. So many of these "have to's" are pure nonsense. Those are still not too bad because the most that they can cost you is some of your hard-earned cash. The problem is that some can cost you your website.

Hopefully this article will help you to avoid some of the more common tricks of the trade.

Myth 1
Submit your site to hundreds of search engines every month.

This one slays me, mainly because it is so easy to create enough hype around it to make so many people believe it. Not only is this totally untrue, but it can hurt your website!

Facts
There are only a handful of search engines worth being listed on.

You do not need to submit to any genuine search engine. It will find you as it crawls the web. The most important thing for you to do is list your site with at least one serious directory and the rest will follow.

Many so-called search engines are in fact link farms and "Free For All" sites. Both of these are loathed by serious search engines and your page being listed on them will score you no brownie points. They will also bring you no business, but are almost guaranteed to bring you loads of spam email.

Once a serious search engine has you in their index there is no reason to submit again. In fact, you're liable to annoy them and get penalised instead. The penalty? - Having your site banned.

Certain search engines, like Inktomi Slurp, Ask Jeeves and most of the ones mentioned in the email that I received, will not accept any submission unless a good sized cheque accompanies it! - Visit these search engines and look for yourself. You will see that this entire email and every one like it, is a deception.