When I built my very first website back in 1996, I needed a way to get traffic to the site. There were hundreds of search engines back then, and 20-30 major players. Just like today, search was the main funnel of traffic on the web. But submitting your site to each of them was a huge pain.

There were a few search engine submission tools out there, but they were pretty expensive and didn’t work particularly well so I decided to build my own. It only took a few days using Visual Basic and suddenly I had a product that people were clamoring for.

So I formed Market-Tek Enterprises, Inc. and threw up a website at Submission-Spider.com and started selling it.

Over the years the software has been used by over three million businesses and individuals in over 40 countries and had over 500 commissioned affiliates selling it around the world. Not bad for something that took me a long weekend to build.

The Software Itself…

It didn’t just submit a web site to the major search engine, but also had a bunch of tools that did a ton of research to give you the data you needed to make professional SEO decisions about your web site. Things like Link Position Analysis, Keyword Analysis, as well as Meta Tag creation, and Dead Link checking, and more.

It even had a built in tech support tool that let you connect straight to hands on help; help for both using the software as well as ranking your site better at the search engines.

Decline and Fall…

As time went on, the search engine industry consolidated into the basic monopoly it is today with Google holding some 60-70% of the search market and Bing/Yahoo scrambling around for the rest.

You don’t really need software to submit a site any more, you can just head over to Google and type in your URL…or wait 10 minutes and the Google Bot will probably find your site itself.

Though there are still people anxious for search engine submission software; and there are still companies selling it, I couldn’t in good conscious continue to sell it knowing that it’s basically useless these days.

It was great software for the times, but sadly faded like so many other web technologies.

Though it was really popular in it’s day; winning a bunch of tech awards, appearing in many tech magazines and websites, and garnering hundreds of glowing – almost cult-like customer testimonials; there’s really no place for it in today’s social dominated web.

Today…

Today Submission-Spider.com continues to sell software related to SEO, but now we sell a quick index tool to help get your site indexed at Google quickly. It’s a pale shadow of the old Submission-Spider when it comes to features (it only has one). So I don’t charge much for it.

R.I.P. Submission-Spider