A fellow business group member posted this article about getting listed on Google. I clicked through to read and was just baffled. I couldn’t figure out why this advice was supposed to work, but it’s not the first time I’ve heard people suggest something like this.

The idea is that instead of submitting your website to Google for inclusion, you submit a page form another website that is linking to you. This doesn’t make sense to me at all and seems like a waste of precious time.

Here’s what I wrote to the group and I’d like to share it with you:

Yikes, that doesn’t seem to be a very useful exercise, but thank youfor sharing the article. Typing in where All the Web (or any other website) links to you into the Google add URL page isn’t going to get you anywhere faster, but this isn’t the first suggestion I’ve heard of this.

Google says:

“We add thousands of new sites to our index each time we crawl theWeb, but if you like, you may submit your URL as well. Submission is not necessary and does not guarantee inclusion in our index. Given the large number of sites submitting URLs, it’s likely your pages will be found in an automatic crawl before they make it into our index through the URL submission form…

…The best way to ensure Google finds your site is for your page to be linked from lots of pages on other sites. Google’s robots jump from page to page on the Web via hyperlinks, so the more sites that link to you, the more likely it is that we’ll find you quickly.”

I’d follow Google’s advice, not the article. Google is basically saying the submission service on Google is a waste of your time…so why do it? Get links from other sites, like they say.

I’ll tell you a secret…get a link from a site that gets crawled frequently. This doesn’t mean it has to be a site that has a high rank (assuming the author of the article means PageRank), but a site that has frequently updated content where Google visits often. This can be a blog, a portal site or just any site that updates frequently and is already listed in Google. When I start a new site, I can get it listed in just a couple days…in most cases…with this technique.

So what does Google Do with All Those URL Submissions?

Well, I’ve shared this theory with a few of my colleagues before (hee hee hee) and here it is. I believe that Google takes all those submissions, prints them out and lines all those pigeons cages with it. You can learn more about Google’s Pigeon Rank from Google. Enjoy!

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