Think back to when stuffing keywords into the META tags and putting some hidden text into the pages was enough to get you a great ranking on the search engines. Now think about the standards for optimization and ranking…much different. This is not necessarily a bad thing, and in actuality has made the Internet better as the standards of search indexes continue to rise. Times change, as do the involved procedures, and the correct procedure for submitting your website to search engines has changed in the past year or two.

There are many tools on the Internet that control an automated submission process to the search engines, allowing users to submit many pages at once to many different search engines. Although this may sound like a good idea, and is an excellent way to save time and money, industry experts have realized that consequences of using these tools may very well exist.

Some of the popular automated tools on the Internet are Web Position Gold, Top Dog, Submit Wolf, eLuminator, Submit It, Self Promotion. For the sake of this article, discussing Web Position Gold will suffice.

Web Position Gold was, and still is, an excellent tool with many great features. This particular application allows the user to auto submit many pages within a website to numerous engines within minutes. After the program has submitted those pages of a site, all records of submissions are placed into a folder, as well as a generated within an HTML-based report for review.

Other tools of this application include the Reporting tool, which is generates an analysis of the keywords selected to numerous search engine results. Additionally, the Critic will analyze the profiled web page, giving suggestions to further enhance rankings in each search engine or directory. The Scheduler feature will allow you to indicate when you should re-submit your site so that you will not forget if you are in charge of numerous sites. All this, and there are still more features…sounds good right?

Of course. But while being a great tool for an overloaded webmaster, the use of Web Position Gold and some other automated programs should now be limited if allowed at all when SEO and site submissions are taken seriously.

The chain reaction effect goes like this:
1) Use of the Internet goes up all over the world
2) More and more websites are put online
3) More and more websites are competing for rankings on SE's
4) SE's get overloaded with submissions by webmasters using automated systems
5) SE's get sick of spam from webmasters and develop filters for detecting the programs

The following has happened to numerous webmasters when they use the submission feature of WP Gold: The person submits the site to Google, and then receives this message: ""We detected that you were using Web Position Gold. As you may know, automated access to Google (e.g., via Web Position Gold) is explicitly against our terms of service http://www.google.com/terms_of_service.html."

When Web Position Gold runs the submission tool or the reporter tool they will send numerous requests and files to Google. Google can detect this and has begun to penalize this type of use as they deem it as "abuse." This is understandable as their server can get bogged down when there are loads of people trying to run reports or do bulk-submissions.

It is in the opinion of this article's editors that when submitting a website to the search engine, it should all be done by hand. If you submit your website manually it can have many positive effects.

One of the advantages of submitting your site by hand is that it is easier to record which search engines you submit to, when you submitted to them, when you should resubmit, and also when the site was indexed. This is very easy to do in a simple Excel spreadsheet.

Another advantage to manual submission is that you will be absolutely sure that your site was entered for submission to each search engine or directory. What happens if you are using WP Gold to submit numerous pages to all of the search engines, and you type in the wrong URL by accident? It is nearly impossible for this to happen if you take the time and submit the site manually.

By far the biggest advantage you can get from manual submission is that you don't run the risk of being penalized for using the automated program. This alone should be enough reason to not use the automated programs. It is not all of the programs that are detected by the search engines, but if the search engines develop a system to detect them all, where does this leave you.

As an SEO Consultancy organization, Orbidex Inc. does manual submissions each and every time and for every website. This is merely the opinion of this editor and Orbidex, and is not meant to slander the companies that produce these tools. Like I said, these tools are great, but there comes a time when things must change and the way that you do things may have to change too. In my opinion, the time has come when all submissions must be done by hand.