How To Recognize a Good Automatic Search Engine Submitter

By Ralph Tegtmeier
Posted Friday, October 22, 2004

A good automatic submission program is quite undetectable if you do it right. So what constitutes a "good" submitter? To qualify, the program must:

- Convey the correct referral (submission) URL.

- Transmit all required data (e.g. email address, where required).

- Use the engine's specific correct submission syntax (by no means a given - this requires extensive and regular updates).

- Allow for customizable submission limits (e.g. 5 pages per domain and day).

- Apply realistic time delays when submitting multiple pages (this would typically mimic manual submission speed).

- Check submission pages for availability (else, it will generate an error message, wasting the search engines' system resources and bandwidth).

- Offer extensive submission reports including snapshots of search engine error message pages to remediate faulty submission processes and/or schedule resubmissions if required.

- Implement scheduled submission requiring no human monitoring.

- Support as many bona fide search engines (including their international web properties) as feasible. (Submitting to hundreds if not thousands of purported "search engines", most of which being, in reality, mere FFA link farms, won't do you any good whatsoever - on the contrary, it will only serve to provoke a flood of spam mail.)

For a very affordable (registration is only $15) but powerful client based application I would recommend TraficStudio's excellent dumpTruck: < (http://www.trafficstudio.com/dumptruck/) >

For a more professional server based solution, check out our own fantomas subFrog PRO(TM) which allows for unlimited URL submissions and cron job scheduling (Unix systems only): < (http://fantomaster.com/fasubfrog0.html) >

About the Author
Ralph Tegtmeier is the co-founder and principal of fantomaster.com Ltd. (UK) and fantomaster.com GmbH (Belgium), < (http://fantomaster.com/) > a company specializing in webmasters software development, industrial-strength cloaking and search engine positioning services. You can contact him at mailto:fneditor@fantomaster.com