Does Auto Submission Damage Your Rankings?

If you're looking for short cuts to high search engine placements, you'll be looking for a very long time. I recently worked with someone on search engine optimization and spent a good deal of time focusing on both on page optimization techniques and off page optimization. Due to a relatively simple web site, optimizing their pages was relatively easy. We soon focused on off page optimization and some techniques to quickly build links to their website.

If you're looking for short cuts to high search engine placements, you'll be looking for a very long time. I recently worked with someone on search engine optimization and spent a good deal of time focusing on both on page optimization techniques and off page optimization. Due to a relatively simple web site, optimizing their pages was relatively easy. We soon focused on off page optimization and some techniques to quickly build links to their website.

Building your web site's popularity is essential for improving your search engine rankings. Major search engines like Google apply an algorithm to define the value of your web site or web page. This in turn drives your search engine ranking for specific keywords. One way to think about the process of web site ranking is like a voting machine. The more votes you get the better your site ranks.

The very first thing to do is to evaluate a web site for the criteria that would make it easy to spider. Search engines spider need to access quality content to better classify each page on the web. After applying navigation that allows users to easily find content and search engine spiders to categorize content properly, its time to identify effective link building strategies.

A popular strategy that is used by many SEO professionals is found in directory submissions. The proper directories can provide one way links that can have a significantly positive impact on the search engine rankings for any web site or blog. For the web site I was recently working on I decided to find a submission service that would take the process of manual submission off the table. I believed that the auto submission would be as effective but require much less effort.

In as little as forty eight hours of the website being submitted through an automated submission service, rankings for particular keywords were negatively impacted and significantly. We lost anywhere from ten to thirty spots on search engine rankings. One might be able to argue that the auto submission was not detectable and therefore could not have had this effect. I disagree as there were no other factors related to SEO that we were working on at the time.

At the time, we were not focused on any other type of link building activity. Due to the immediate nature of the impact on search rankings, I've concluded that automated submission had a negative impact that was significant. My only hope is that its not everlasting.

If you are familiar with search engine optimization and building links to improve your search engine ranking, be cautious of automatic submission services. Whether it be for search engine submission or directory submission, you can damage your current rankings. Major search engines seem to be catching on to automatic submission sites and are having an impact on results. I still encourage you to submit your website to a small number of choice directories but do it one site at a time.