also how does it compare quality and price wise to that of using submit it on a regular basis???

louis@health4her.com

UK Plus charge between £49 - £99 to be added to their site. Surely they are not that good?!?

As for Submit It... please. Spare yourself, and find a top-notch comedy site online. It's the only place you'll find a joke that big.

Set the parameters of this forum, "other", at one year. Somewhere back there, there is a huge thread on this subject. It was hotly discussed. The pros and cons of the legitimate services are greatly debated. Everything you want to know is in there.

As Dave pointed out, there is alot of junk being pushed on unsuspecting people too. Most of the spam you will be receiving will fall under this catagory, but there are legititmate services too.

A few of the professionals here use software to aid submissions. But, I think I am safe in saying none of them use it for the majors, just FFA's. I personally don't use any, or I would give you a recommendation.

If you are looking for software for submissions, then read this thread:

http://virtualpromote.com/searchengineforums/Forum11/HTML/000115.html

There are 2 main packages available and they do make the submissions go much faster. However, go with what Janet said about manually submitting to the majors: Excite, Infoseek, Webcrawler, HotBot, Lycos, Altavista and Looksmart. The majors all have different laws regarding how many pages you can submit and how often you can submit to them.

Because they are so important, you don't want to slip up and push that submit button and realize later that "oops, I should have turned off the switch for that SE before running the app". The rest of the search engines should be OK for use of the 2 apps outlined in the above link.

Janet sure is right on the button about getting spam from the FFA's. Technically it's "junk email" rather than "spam" because you did the submissions and are suppose to know that you will get replies [loaded with sales pitches and such].

If I were you, I'd set up a seperate email account and submit to all the FFA's with that email account as the recieving email box. Then you might want to give the messages a quick once over to see if anything in the flood of replies is worth keeping or looking into. You'll be able to stay organized with the email using that approach. That way when you perform that massive email delete, you won't risk deleting other email that gets caught up in the mess.

in his list of majors to submit to manually, he inadvertently overlooked Yahoo. ALWAYS do it yourself there, without exception.

Also, since you may be relatively new to all this, FFA's are Free For All link pages, wherein anyone may add a link themselves of just about any sort. These are usually quite disorganized, and seldom produce any significant traffic at all unless you are selling a product/service to webmasters. The quality of the sites running FFA's is varied.

Please ignore this if you already knew the above, but I didn't want you to scratch your head at the term "FFA".

A couple of things.

1. E-spotting results are still there. Try 'London Hotels'

2. UK Plus is it worth it - are there any other free submissions UK directories out there.

3. Inktomi is worth it - and it doesn't cost much and think of all the various search facilities you are going to get rankings on.

The other thing is, Submit Wolf Pro does not submit to Yahoo and I think Net Submitter Pro "probably" doesn't either. It's too complicated for the submission software to correctly pick the right categories. Yahoo is human controlled and it would be virtually impossible for the software to think like a human.

I think it's a bit rich for UKPlus to charge for considering a listing, because if you ARE listed and somebody clicks through to your site from their directory, it is placed in a frame with an ugly big strip on the top of the page with a logo for UKPlus, a search box AND a 468 x 60 banner.

Nevertheless, do you think it's worth coughing up the money?

The fee is of a significant nature, considering it's in pounds, therefore i dont want to submit my site with the chance of getting it rejected. Therefore i feel that it's necessary to know how strict the editors are.

I have seen .com's in the directory, consequently we know that they are aloud. But how much UK content does one need. Are the odds of approval significantly enhanced if one uses a .co.uk extension?

We know how looksmart and yahoo use an algo that searches:
1. URL keywords
2. Title
3. Description
4. Site popularity tracking
To determine a sites listing and how it can be found.
Does anyone have any info on the algo UKplus utilizes? Is it similar, does it search for keywords like these do.

I'll let everyone know how my site submission went along.

One thing that should be mentionned is that the final price came to be:
116.32

They also use worldpay for credit card processing... the form page is picky, it took me over half an hour of submitting my credit card info before it let it through. The trick is not to write down your address in the address field. Your city and province (or state) is what they really want.

I have a biz dev meeting next week with them and, as usual, will ask search volumes on certain key words.

They drive good traffic to ppc listings and listings in top 3 others just don't get any traffic for me