See you here next month.

The biggest sites on the Web are regularly spidered by the main search engines and suffer relatively few search engine problems. For everybody else, it's a continual battle to get indexed and stay indexed. Assuming your site is regularly updated, you need to resubmit it to all the major search engines on a periodic basis. Here at the WDJ we recommend once a month. As a useful service for webmasters, this page lists the AddURL pages of the major engines. Simply visit this WDJ page once a month and resubmit your site to all the engines. Many of the automatic multiple submission systems are now being ignored by the engines, but you shouldn't experience that kind of problem with this streamlined manual method.

The add URL pages will appear in new windows. Copy your URL from your home page and paste into the add URL field, press the confirm/enter button, then close the window and open the next one. The entire resubmission should take just a few minutes.

AltaVista

http://www.altavista.com/cgi-bin/query?pg=addurl

Google

http://www.google.com/addurl.html

Excite

http://www.excite.com/info/add_url_form

Go (also does infoseek). Add a slash (/) at the end of your URL.

http://www.go.com/AddUrl?pg=SubmitUrl.html&svx=CTOC_Add_url

Northern Light

http://www.northernlight.com/docs/regurl_help.html

Lycos

http://www.lycos.com/addasite.html

Hotbot (possibly the best way to get noticed by inktomi, which doesn't have a submit URL page, is to submit to Hotbot).

http://hotbot.lycos.com/addurl.asp

Direct Hit (influences Hotbot and MSN)

http://www.directhit.com/util/addurl.html

AllTheWeb (including Fast, influences Lycos)

http://www.ussc.alltheweb.com/add_url.php3

Canada.com (appears to influence Hotbot). Has two confirmation buttons in sequence.

http://www.canada.com/search/web/addurl.asp

Directories

It's pretty much essential to submit to these three directories. You should only need to do it once, except for Yahoo! (try resubmitting about every three months). For each directory, go to the correct category page for your site and from there click on Add URL.

Open Directory Project (used by Google, Netscape and many more)

http://www.dmoz.org

Looksmart

http://www.looksmart.com/

Yahoo!

http://www.yahoo.com/

Snap is also a worthwhile directory, but cheekily it forces you to register before submitting.

http://www.snap.com/