Well, if you have been diligently following my advice these past few months, you will have submitted your site by now and have been monitoring the listings. You may have found that the site is not showing up in searches. You are not alone. The major Search Engines and Directories are going through a soul searching phase lately and are trying to figure out what they are all about. With up to 10,000 new domains being added per day, and the fact that few are actually making money, they are trying to figure out what the future is likely to bring.

If they add every site that adds a URL to their list, they feel that they are likely to dilute their ability to bring out valid results. Yet, valid results have always been a huge question mark. For this reason, many of the search portals (AOL, MSN, GO/InfoSeek) have incorporated human based directories to serve the function of filtering out the wheat from the chaff. But, because the human based systems are labor and time intensive, the ability of a human based directory to accumulate a viable and accurate database that truly pleases everyone is a serious question.

The spider based engines are themselves getting bogged down in the volume of new additions and having a difficult time accurately adding sites to the system. Excite, Alta Vista, Inktomi are accepting cites for spidering, but are either not spidering at all, like Excite, or are accepting the URL submission, spidering the page(s), accepting the listing, but not adding it to the index (Alta Vista and Inktomi). In simpler terms, an awful lot of sites just don't "stick". There is a lot of discussion in Search Engine forums as to what exactly is going on, while the Search folks are being quite silent about it all.

The long and the short of it seems to be that the only way to get your site to show up in the search results is to diligently resubmit once a month. That way, you are in a position to catch the Search sites at a time when they decide to resume their spidering and cataloguing the way they did in the past. Chances are, that they will resume operations, because without constantly updating, they will find that their results have grown so old and outdated that many searchers will simply turn to newer and more focused search sites. So, I strongly suggest that, if you haven't seen any results yet, you keep on trying it will happen.