Attracta.com / "weekly submissions to top 100 search engines"

[WillWatrous]

I recently received an offer from Attracta.com because I have a hostgator account. They are offering different levels of service for submitting xml sitemaps on a weekly basis. Is this a good idea?

Thanks for your feedback!

Will

PS see graphic:

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[CaseyKluver]

Hi Will,

Today, there isn't much value in search engines besides the top 3, Google, Bing & Yahoo. There is really no difference in those 100 search engines to the top 3.

That being said, Google, Bing & Yahoo are all sophisticated enough to crawl and find your website without it being "submitted". It is a great idea to submit a sitemap for sure, but you dont need to submit it every week. If you follow the http://www.sitemaps.org/ guidelines you can set it up where the search engines will automatically revisit your sitemap and crawl your content on a daily, weekly, monthly, etc basis.

Also, If you are using WordPress you can download a free plugin to create your sitemap that makes it easy to set up the crawl basis.

I hope this helps.

Thanks,

Casey

[DougRoberts]

Do you need this service? Do you have a problem getting your site indexed?

As Casey said, as long as you follow the guidelines search engines can quickly index your site. Building some good links from good authority sites can help search engines find you.

Google webmaster tools tells you when you sitemap was last processed and you can see your crawl stats to see how many pages are being crawled/day.

If your site isn't getting indexed, then I'd try to find out the route cause rather than pay for a "search engine nagging" service like this.

[ShaMenz]

Hi Will,

The advice already given here is solid.

In addition to that, a little personal experience I will share.

I had a client who accepted the offer you have received when the service first came out a couple of years or so ago. They told me that they saw a significant loss of indexed pages and traffic to their site within a short time.

I cannot say that what happened to their site was a direct result of using the service as I was not in control of the site at that time. However, I do know that once they decided they wanted to remove the service it took me almost 8 months to get the company to do so!

Hope that helps,

Sha

[emerald]

I found your replies helpful as I have just found a competitor site jumped into no.1 position from nowhere. Their strongest link in OSE is from their sitemap page listed on http://cdn.attracta.com/sitemap/competitor-sitemap/ which seems to have very high DA/PA so I was thinking of submitting the same.

Of course I already have my own sitemap.xml created on my site and submitted to Google Webmaster Tools and I don't have any crawl or indexing problems, but I was thinking that getting this additional sitemap hosted on Attracta must be passing some link juice because of the PA?

They seem to have a free submission just for sitemap so I thought an additional submission here would be free and harmless? Would it not?

I guess I am hesitating after what has been written here though.

[InRealTime]

There seems to be some confusion surrounding XML sitemap usage so I'd like to clear that up.

Many people question the need for an XML Sitemap, and for frequently updating it.However, creating and submitting an accurate up-to-date and properly formatted XML Sitemap in a fundamental part on good on-site SEO and really pays off.Websites are never hurt or penalized in any way by using sitemaps. Even if you already have a XML sitemap, adding  a second will still help. In fact, if you look at Google's own robots.txt file ( http://www.google.com/robots.txt ) you can clearly see they are using multiple sitemaps themselves.

Google recommends XML Sitemap submission in all of their Webmaster and SEO tutorials:  " Whether your site is old or new, we highly recommend  you submit an XML Sitemap" - Google Webmaster Tutorial

In fact, recommending people NOT use a XML Sitemap in #4 on SEOmoz's list: "The Biggest SEO Mistakes SEOmoz Has Ever Made" written by a widely recognized SEO expert, the CEO of SEOMoz himself: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-the-biggest-seo-mistakes-seomoz-has-ever-made

Attracta is the largest supplier of XML sitemaps with over 2.8 million websites using them, and that seems to be what makes them have such a very high PR. Also, Attracta sitemaps are free, show you exactly when Google and other search engines access them, and can be updated and resubmitted at anytime.