Google is not The Only Search

While Google is undoubtedly the dominant search engine and brings in the most traffic for most websites, the dangers of optimising a website for a single search engine are clear. With Google collecting such a lot of user information it is fast becoming a monopolistic power.

For small web sites that are just starting, trying to take on Google is tall order and even for well optimised sites there are other ways to bring in traffic to your site.

Submitting your site to many search engines is not going to set the world on fire but at the same time it should not be sniffed at. Even with one or two hits from each of these, when they are in the indexed they are listed permanently and it should be easier to appear on the first few pages.

Many of the smaller search engines are powered by either Google or Yahoo so they should already have your site indexed and do not need to be submitted to again.  However, there are some smaller search engines and search directories which are free and require very little effort to submit to, such as:

• Altavista.com
• Gigablast.com
• AlltheWeb
• Lycos.com
• MixCat.com
• Jayde.com
• MyGreenCorner.com
• http://www.qango.com
• http://www.skaffe.com
• http://www.mahalo.com

As an aside, to stop Google having the majority of searches I regularly change my default search engine when making queries to give other search engines a chance to return results. On my own, the effect is insignificant but if more people did it then we could bring some competition between the search engines. Google is not the only search engine.