In web terms "retro" may have its place in design look-and-feel, but its not really a good idea to use it as a credo for anything else. Where is this going? Its going down a big, dark, lonely hole that's where- or rather it is if you use crappy submission services to promote your site. In the year dot it might have been a vaguely good idea to perform multiple manual submissions to search engines and directories. It might also have helped your rankings by linking to anything with a "dot" in its name. But its 2008 and (most) people are wise to what will help your SEO and what will kick it to death- or so you'd think.

I recently came across a Google Ad for website promotion- found when searching "SEO". It offers to "Promote Your Website to 700,000 Search Engines. 100% Automated!". At first I thought that it was a bit of fun, that someone sparky had created the ad as bait, and that there would be something sensible behind it- along the lines of "if you think this is a good idea then you need guidance and advice, and we're the people for the job".

Guess what? The ad really was offering that service. That's right, not only can you get your site blacklisted and banned from the engines in one "100% Automated!" hit, but you can pay for the privilege. To be fair I didn't know that there are 700,000 engines, but now I do I know how to get banned from them all. For me the best part of the offer is that they'll submit you to FFA's (Free For All sites aka link farms) so there'll be a legacy of this stupidity for a long time to come.

Apparently "NO ONE submits to more engines!!" and I know why- you probably do too. Its because it is a REALLY VERY BAD IDEA- here's why. Google, and other engines, can spot when a site is desperately, unfairly grasping at ways to increase its visibility. There are 2 explicit parts of Google's Quality guidelines (basic principles) that cover this:

*Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links- that's the "Promote Your Website to 700,000 Search Engines" part covered.

*Don't use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our Terms of Service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold^TM that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google- that's the "100% Automated!" part covered.

So, if you see an ad like this:

...don't take it seriously, don't think it's a good idea, and for God's sake don't do it!