Contacting Google about this problem, sad to say, has been akin to dealing with phone company before competition. Headache, heartache and misunderstandings. Calls to Google AdWord call center were met with either sympathy or apathy. One Googler said they felt bad and that others had complained about same problem but his proverbial hands were tied. Another just couldn’t get her head around issue and kept telling us “you need to re-write ad, re-write ad” which was answered with “it has worked for months without a problem; five missed clicks are clearly a fluke” response “you need to re-write the, re-write ad”. Lastly, a Google Phone Supervisor when asked out of frustration who her boss was replied “I’m not telling, find out for yourself if you can, but I’m not telling you”. What? Now we have name and ID number of said employees, but we won’t reveal them even if Google were to contact us. Why? Because, overall Google is a great company with good customer service and sharp products. Also, no reason to get involved with Google HR issues, folks all seemed nice - just not helpful. Okay, Phone Supervisor was a little craggy but no big deal. Instead of waiting until Google solves this issue on their own, here is a simple solution that can satisfy all, further lining Google’s pockets while earning small and large businesses qualified clicks. Google should institute a system where ads that have performed well over time are given a little leeway in regards to 5/1,000 rule. Much like a credit card, ads that have consistently performed well over a set period of time would be given a higher “line of credit” perhaps a minimum of 25 clicks over 5000 impressions. The click rate Google wants is same but buyer is given a little room when an anomaly occurs. Missing 5 clicks over a thousand impressions is a fluke, missing 25 over 5,000 could be deemed more of a pattern. Also, 1,000 impressions on a high volume search term on Google can literally happen in four or five minutes. So even if you’ve had months of success with “Gold T-Shirts”, five minutes can change everything. The weird part in www.threedayweekends.com case - real example we studied – is that Google is turning down literally $75-125 a day in business. Now we all know that brains behind Google could solve a math and programming issue like this quite quickly. In meantime, smart marketers like www.threedayweekends.com will have to search for other terms and other places to spend money Google doesn’t want.

Dilemma indeed. Getting in Google is a MUST, yet if you want your website to be liked by Google, it'd need *fingers* (meaning links) pointing at it.

The way out

ODP (Open Directory Project http://www.dmoz.org/) is first choice. But there it takes a long time, being human-controlled initiative (consider consulting Seotie http://www.seotie.com/ to monitor your website's inclusion in DMOZ directory, in case you've submitted to ODP).

Another factor to think over is once listed in ODP, it is very difficult to alter your listing. Even a small change of a webpage url may render your ODP listing unworthy.

In comes therefore necessity of submitting to other search engines, relatively smaller ones, yet important ones at that. There are in fact quite a few of them with decent traffic flow. An advantage here is most search engines list websites in relevant categories and therefore once listed, links from them are what I call *highly-targeted-link-sources*.

Where to find them

A handy list of nearly 50 search engines and directories according to their Alexa Traffic Rank is maintained by FreeWebSubmission http://www.freewebsubmission.com/, refreshed on first of every month. For example, Google's Alexa rank is 5.

Other important ones in this list are AltaVista http://addurl.altavista.com/addurl/new (Alexa Rank 58), AllTheWeb http://www.alltheweb.com/add_url.php (Alexa Rank 199), What U Seek http://www.whatuseek.com/addurl-secondary.shtml (Alexa Rank 2523), ScrubTheWeb http://www.scrubtheweb.com/addurl.html (Alexa Rank 2555), ExactSeek http://www.exactseek.com/add.html (Alexa Rank 2471), SearchHippo http://www.searchhippo.com/addlink.php (Alexa Rank 3041), EntireWeb http://www.entireweb.com/eng/basic/ (Alexa Rank 3667), GigaBlast http://www.gigablast.com/addurl (Alexa Rank 6860) and Gimpsy http://www.gimpsy.com/ (Alexa Rank 7222).

FreeWebSubmission http://www.freewebsubmission.com/ also offers free submission to 20 search engines at one go. [Note Alexa rankings given here are for August, 2003]. To know how Alexa ranks webpages, go here http://pages.alexa.com/exec/faqsidos/help/index.html?index=1.

Here is an interesting article by Barry Lloyd http://www.searchengineblog.com/columns/optimising_for_inktomi.htm. He proffers that optimizing for Inktomi can later translate into Google success. Don't forget to look at it http://www.searchengineblog.com/columns/optimising_for_inktomi.htm.

The bottom line

Search engine submission is but one small part of web success. If you stay put on Web taking good care of your core business, chance is you'll be *discovered* sooner than later. Pause awhile now and then and renew your *friendship* with smaller search engines. The surfing traffic may seldom find you there, but Google surely will. And that's important.