Which is Better: Manual Submission or Automated?

Besides illustrating WebPosition Gold's market leadership, the I-Search survey presented some opinions that, at first glance, might be surprising. Most notably, 84% of those surveyed submit their sites manually. Many claimed that it's more effective than automated submissions.

Therefore, the question arises: Is manual submission really better? The answer is YES, in some cases. If you're going to submit to directory sites like Yahoo, or Open Directory then we have always recommended you do this manually. The reasons are explained in our Directory Submission Guide in WebPosition Gold's Submitter. These directories can bring you tremendous traffic if you take the time to submit to them PROPERLY and follow the tips we outline. Yahoo, alone, commands over 50% of all search engine traffic according to most surveys, so its importance cannot be understated.

On the other hand, if you're submitting to a full-text search engine like AltaVista, HotBot, or Google.com, then automated submissions will save you valuable time. In the past, automated submitters fell into disfavor because they did not emulate a browser when they submitted. Many of the search engines were reported to place automated submissions into a lower priority queue, which caused it to take longer for these sites to be indexed. WebPosition Gold has always emulated a standard browser to overcome this kind of discrimination.

Another problem that has caused some to dismiss all automated submitters has been the perception that they are less accurate. When a bulk submitter submits to 500 or more sites, it's obvious many of those submissions will fail because of changes at some of the engines that occur daily. There's simply no way for these products to always be 100% compliant with all those engines at all times.

Therefore, some people concluded that ALL automated submission tools are less accurate than manual submissions. In the case of WebPosition, however, we auto-submit to only the top search engines. Therefore, our accuracy is almost always 100%. Moreover, the top engines and directories account for over 95% of the market, and so the importance of those 100's of other engines that few people have ever heard of, becomes insignificant.

In WebPosition, if an engine changes their submission format, the submission will be reported to you as "failed" and will link to a page that gives a reason for the failure. For example, sometimes engines will not accept ANY submissions for a period of days or weeks while they perform maintenance.

Even when WebPosition reports that a submission has succeeded, it links to the results page that the engine returned, so at any time, you can still manually verify that the submission was successful. Many automated submitters do not give you this peace of mind.

Submitting manually and automatically both have their place. That's why WebPosition Gold is designed to choose the best method for each search engine or directory to maximize both your time and effectiveness.

Could my competitors be spamming me?

Your competitors cannot normally change the content of your Web site if you've kept your password a secret. However, some Webmasters worry that a competitor could submit you repetitively, causing your site to get you blocked on AltaVista. Although this is possible, AltaVista claims that they account for that scenario. Here's an excerpt from issue #40 of the Search Engine Watch report (http://www.searchenginewatch.com). Tracy Roberts, AltaVista's marketing director, was being interviewed:

"If your pages are gone, and if you get a 'Too many URLs at that site have been submitted today' message when resubmitting, then there's a pretty good chance AltaVista has decided you were spamming them. If you disagree, then you should get in contact using AltaVista's feedback form. 'We are monitoring those, so that when a request is made, we will go in and look at the site,' Roberts said."

Could someone be oversubmitting your site to make it seem as if you were spamming? Perhaps, but Roberts said, "AltaVista has mechanisms to check on this." Personally, I would hope that AltaVista does not attempt to ban sites based solely on their number of submissions. If so, there are many ways this could be abused by unethical competitors.

This article is copyrighted and has been reprinted with permission from FirstPlace Software, the makers of WebPosition Gold. FirstPlace Software helped define the SEO industry with the introduction of the first product to track your rankings on the major search engines and to help you improve those rankings. A free trial of WebPosition Gold is available from their Web site.

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