Bonzawebsites is regularly consulted by clients who have received email stating that their site “is not in” or “is not well positioned in” all the search engines.

The email offers a service to rectify this and the question we get is: "Are these services any good?"

The short answer is "No".

Here's why:

Over 90% of search engine traffic on the internet comes via the top 10 search engines. (Google, Yahoo, Overture, Looksmart, MSN, Open Directory etc.)

The relationship that search engines have with each other is complex; they all feed off each others databases and the small guys source all their information from the bigger guys.

Example: The top search engine is Google which shares its listings with Yahoo, Teoma,  AOL and Netscape.

Overture contributes to Excite, Alta Vista and Yahoo which in turn shares with….!

Open Directory contributes to Google and Lycos and many, many smaller directories.

Because of this web of sharing data it is very important to know how to submit to the major search engines and directories to get the best exposure for your site.

There exists submission criteria for all the major search engines. If you don’t follow the guidelines or abuse the process by resubmitting relentlessly, you risk having your site rejected or banned for life. Directories like Yahoo and Open Directory have human editors who carefully control all the submissions. They reject automated submissions as a matter of course.

These guidelines are changed all the time and so are the search engine’s algorithms to reduce the amount of rubbish that is submitted daily. The main focus of all the search engines and directories is “relevancy”. There’s a big push to delete all the rubbish, to fine tune the databases so when you search for something you’ll receive results you’re looking for without having to plough through pages of irrelevant returns.

Bonza's mode of operation is to very carefully hand submit sites to each of the majors bearing in mind the things we know the editors of each specific engine "like". This gets the site well positioned in the majors and it tends to be automatically picked up by the minors in time.

Getting back to "the email", these services tend to use submission software. The programs repeatedly throw the site at search engines. They are examined for relevancy, often rejected or listed poorly, and the software simply throws the site back at the search engine.

Search engines can judge a site as highly relevant if other sites have links to it.

Some misguided people think "link popularity" is important but don't understand the critical reason for that (peer acceptance). In an effort to increase link popularity, they list the site with "Link Farms". A Link Farm is a website which exists for the sole purpose of linking websites to other websites. Search engines view this tactic as the utterly pointless exercise it is, and, furthermore, it is considered spamming and can result in your site being banned.

Here's a typical list of the "search engines" to which these folk claim to submit your site. Most are not search engines at all! (We've highlighted the Link Farms). How many of the "search engines" have you heard of???

What to do about these credible looking emails that come so close to persuading you to send them your precious cash in an effort to increase your search engine positioning?

Our advice is: Delete them. Have nothing to do with them. Their system doesn't work. It is, in fact, highly counterproductive.

Be assured Bonzawebsites does know how to correctly go about the very slow process of getting your site well positioned in the major search engines.

We are working on your site all the time and we'll get there in the end.