How does 4Traffic's submission service work?

You input your web address, e-mail address, check the boxes for which search engines you want, then submit. No other information is needed.

After submitting I saw a lot of small frames. What was that?

We show you a frame for each search engine, so you can verify that we properly submitted your site to each search engine you selected. You can scroll through each and see the same screen you would have seen had you gone to the trouble of finding each submission page and submitting yourself. Once you are done (or if you don't care to check,) you'll find the 4Traffic home page at the bottom. Click on Home to get out.

Can you explain your re-submission offer?

Sure. We will automatically re-submit your site for you periodically to ensure that your site not only gets indexed, but stays indexed. Sites are removed from search engines because the search engines have limited capacity, or because they tried to reach your site when your server was down or unreachable and so it was assumed that your site was gone. If you want to prevent this without coming back to re-submit every month, you can join our banner exchange and put a banner on the page you want re-submitted. Another option is that you can include the code below which shows our small button on the page you want re-submitted. Only the last page you submitted will be eligible for automatic re-submission (so if you submit a new, but less important page through us, you may want to go back and re-submit your primary page so it will be the last.)

I submitted my site, but when I do a search it doesn't come up. Why?

Most search engines have quite a backlog. The time from when you submit your site, to when it's actually indexed, can be anywhere from days to months. AltaVista seems to only take a week or two, and the Inktomi based search engines are fast as well.

It's been quite some time since I submitted and my site still hasn't come up. What can I do?

First, go to one of the search engines (this works with AltaVista for instance) and put in your domain name "blah.com/stuff", "stuff.blah.com", or however you submitted it. This search will show you if you have any pages indexed. If not, re-submit; submissions are often "lost" or ignored. If it's there, but still doesn't appear with normal searches, check out these search engine tips, modify your pages, then re-submit.

I've seen offers to submit to hundreds or even thousands of search engines. Why do you only have a couple dozen?

Do you really think there are that many? Most of those are what are called FFAs, or Free-For-All sites. You submit your site and e-mail address to them, and it stays on their list til it gets bumped off the next day by someone else's. Meanwhile, they spam your e-mail with junkmail. However, we do get you in more search engines then it appears. Many search engines use the Inktomi engine. By submitting to one (Hotbot for instance,) you get your site in all. Yahoo and GoTo both partially use the Inktomi engine. Also, there are meta-search engines out there that only search other search engine results, so being indexed in one search engine can get you found by Go2Net or Metacrawler.

Why don't you submit to Yahoo? Aren't they the biggest?

Yahoo is technically a directory, not a search engine. Each Yahoo entry is categorized by a human (which is why it takes months to get listed by them, and why they usually give such poor results.) Still, Yahoo gets 55% of all search engine traffic, so if you have a large, high-quality site, try to get listed. If you aren't in their directory, you may still get traffic from them: When their directory doesn't return any results, they use the Inktomi engine to give alternate results.

You don't submit to my favorite search engine.

Mail 4Traffic, perhaps we can fix that.