Yahoo Submission Form Down?

Yahoo’s free submission form has been down for about a month now as originally
reported by Barry Swartz at Search Engine Roundtable. Danny Sullivan posted today that it is still down. There is even ongoing threads about this at both Search Engine Watch Forums and Webmaster World.

Warning: personal rant coming. I am surprised that people still concern themselves over submitting their site to search engines. Why? Because you do not need to submit your web site for inclusion into Yahoo. Same is true of Google and MSN. They will find your site on their own. In fact, I personally believe submission forms simply exist to lead people to believe that they can submit their sites so they will not bug the search engines with inquiries on how to submit their site. In other words, I think they are completely ignored and have even heard a search engine rep from Google allude to that in a past Search Engine Strategies conference (although they wouldn’t out right admit it).

If you want to get your new site into Yahoo, Google or MSN, all you need to do is get a few sites that are already in their index to link to yours. Directories such as Go Guides, JoeAnt, Skaffe and WoW are a good place to start. The big three will find your site on their own. They actually prefer it this way. The majority of submissions they receive through submission forms are spam anyway. I can understand this as someone who operates four separate company sites in which we get a ton of spam through our various inquiry forms.

So who cares if Yahoo’s submission form is broken? You don’t need it anyway. I haven’t submitted a site in this manner for probably five years or more now and all the sites I deal with still get in the index. I would like to see all the big three do away with free submission forms. Ask Jeeves doesn’t have one and they still index sites. Sure Yahoo, Google and MSN might get bombarded with inquiries but hey, that is what auto-responders are good for?