Should you pay for search engine submission?

Search engines are the largest source of traffic for most websites, so it’s no surprise that webmasters want to rank as well on them as possible. Before good rankings can be obtained, however, first search portals need to find the site.

The good thing is this usually happens automatically without any need for action on the website owner’s part. Search engines routinely crawl the web looking for new sites to add to their indexes. It’s not unheard of for a new site to be indexed in less than 48 hours. In this day and age, manual submission is obsolete.

Many hosts, however, offer a search engine submission service. Sometimes it’s made available as a free perk for hosting customers, but in most cases, a nominal fee is charged. Features vary from provider to provider, but in general the service submits a URL to several hundred search sites.

Will this boost your site’s traffic? In short, no. While it never hurts for your site to be listed on as many search engines as possible, only three count: Google, Yahoo, and Bing. These are also the sites most likely to find your URL automatically. All other search engines will drive little if any traffic to your site.