International Search Engines Options

I have a couple of clients whose sites have universal appeal and I'm pondering submission to International search engines. TopDog lists 301 of them. Any thoughts on this tool or how best to find and submit to relevant Intl. SEs without spending hours at it?

Not sure, but can point you to this page on my site that has Intl engines that were recommended - http://www.cre8pc.com/search_internation.html

I added them last year, so click at your own risk

Kim

I was going to suggest Search engine Colossus, but it's the second one down on Kim's page. 8)

Unfortunately, I think to do it right, you might have to spend hours manually submitting. We get a lot of foreign traffic, so those submissions seem like they were worth doing.

Are you recommending SE Colossus over TopDog, or haven't you tried the latter? Why do you think manual submissions are necessary vs. using these tools? Do you have or know of a comprehensive, up-to-date list of international SEs worth submitting to?

ricka,

I haven't used topdog, so I can't tell you have effective/ineffective it would be.

SE Colossus is a "comprehensive, up-to-date list of international SEs worth submitting to," to use your words. In addition to listing the languages that submissions should be made in, it also tells you whether or not the engine is intended for submission of local (that country only) or international based sites.

Another site that might help you make up you mind as to whether or not you even want to bother with a particular search engine is ebusinessforum.com. There's a dropdown box about halfway down the page that lets you choose a country, and a report on the resulting page that tells you a bit about that country, including their ebusiness readiness.

If I wanted to submit to search engines in Belgium, I could look up Belgium in ebusinessforums, which tells me that:

Fifty-eight per cent of Internet users in Belgium regularly use e-mail, against 73% in Germany, 63% in the Netherlands and 59% in France. Mobile access to the Internet (WAP) is not yet widespread, but standard messaging (SMS) is on the increase. Regarding other online services, around one-third of Internet users regularly make online purchases, nearly one-quarter uses Internet banking and around one-tenth seek employment over the Internet. The best-known Internet brands among Belgian users tend to be US service providers such as Yahoo! (known by 99% of Internet users) and Altavista (98%). The Belgian search engine, AdValvas, is well known (93%), but other Belgian brands less so. emphasis mine

I would then look at SE Colossus, to see the search engines listed for Belgium.


If the sites you are promoting are in more than one language, then you can submit the appropriate pages to search engines in those languages.

While this may not be appropriate for your circumstance, we also discovered that our best customers in non-english countries aren't always individuals, but rather financial institutions, attorneys, and accountants who also speak English, and expressed an interest in reselling our services to people who don't speak english. When we focused the language of our submissions to those groups, we've gotten some positive responses.

Thanks Bill. I remember looking at SE Colossus a couple of years ago. As you say, it would take hours to submit manually to all of those. Usually, (and at the moment for the 2 sites I have in mind) I would want to submit to SEs that accepted Engilish language sites and that didn't care if the site had universal appeal - i.e., didn't specifically pertain to a particular country. Maybe after going through them all once and bookmarking the sites that meet those criteria, future submissions wouldn't take that long. Would still like to hear a comparison of this approach to using TopDog, if anyone reading this has done both.

Hi Rick,
My experience has been that each country is different, but if you really want traffic to an english language site from anorher country a large proportion of the population in these countries seem to use the same major search engines that are used in the US.

There are countries, such as Japan, Korea and China where effective market penetration requires a local language site and mentality,

There are a few sources that you might use to help out - Dreamsubmit.com has a large list of foreign search engines and I believe they they have a submission service but they also submit to 2500 FFA sites.

You may also try http://announce.esubmit-it.com/ who have a list of 1200 engines they will submit to for a modest fee. NOTE I know the owner Debi Gell and she does NOT submit to FFA sites, but only to niche search engines and directories.

Greetings!

Russian Search Engines:
1. Yandex (most popular) http://www.yandex.ru
2. Rambler http://www.rambler.ru
3. Aport http://www.aport.ru
4. Google (yes, Google!) http://www.google.com.ru
... little traffic (maximum 1%):
Turtle http://www.turtle.ru , Punto http://www.punto.ru .

Thank you chaif!

I will add these to the list on my site.

Kim

You'll find that many international SE's only accept sites, and sometimes even domains, that are based in their own countries.

But national SE's don't always specify this on their first submit page, so it can be very trying to do all the work only to end up having your submission refused. This varies a lot, though, and there is no way of knowing. For instance, I wasted hours submitting to an array of Australian and Austrian sites, to no avail, while 15 out of 16 Brazilian sites accepted my submissions (that's because Brazilians, generally speaking, are open-minded about foreign influences).

Yet, most of the time, you can't bypass national SE's: if you specifically wanted to cultivate a Danish or an Italian audience, you'd have to be registered with Jubii or Virgilio, which are, respectively, a majority of Danish and Italian users' favorite SE's.

For a good ressource, try: http://www.twics.com/~takakuwa/search/search.html which covers 199 countries. But it won't keep you from wasting lots of time!

Hi Michel - welcome!

The resource you pointed to may be very good, but it's unavailable. Is the url correct?

Phil.

Take the comma off the end of the URL, after .html. Oh well...

I shoulda noticed that :oops:

No problem, I had to try it three times myself before figuring out what the problem was :wink:

Hi Ricka,

Here is a tool that submits to international search engines - http://www.international-search-engine-submission.com. It allows you to choose the countries you would like to submit to.

Gary

On a related note, a client is going to have their site translated into several languages. What are the pros and cons of getting different domain names for each language version of the site rather than dedicating a separate section of the site or a sub-domain to each one?

On a related note, a client is going to have their site translated into several languages. What are the pros and cons of getting different domain names for each language version of the site rather than dedicating a separate section of the site or a sub-domain to each one?

For best results, you really should have the various country specific top-level-domains for each country/language you want to have the site translated to. That way you'll be able to get the site listed appropriately in the relevant international engines.

Jill

Can you register an international domain name even though the company is in the US? If so, this would work for the German, French, and Japanese versions of the site, but what about the Spanish? There are so many Spanish-speaking countries. Would you just register it in Spain and not worry about the others?

It varies, Rick.

Several countries require you to have a physical presence (an office, however small) within the country before you may purchase a TLD for that country. France is the most obvious example.

If the company is multi-national (not just targetting multi-national customers) this isn't a problem. However, if the company is regional, it certainly is a problem.

TLD's are best, and help not only with regional directories, but also with filtering on searches (pages only from 'X' country). However, without a physical presence, subdomains are likely to be the only realistic option. On the plus-side though, subdomains are great for brand-building.

hi
i recommended ineedhits.com and 123submit.com