Is Search Engine Submission required?

[slogger]

As a noobie to the internet presence eight months ago I signed up to everything from my hosting company!

Unlimited hosting (bandwidth and storage), online visitor stat's and of course a package to sbmit my sites to 500 search engines each month for the next 12 months...

Now reviewing my costs (and trying to understand the internet a bit more) I would like to ask, is the final point necessary?

I have just changed my site from a template to one I have built myself and I have noticed that when looking at the cache page on Google, some of the links have been refreshed with the new site.

So two questions:
1) If I have not paid for a company to submit my site, would the main (and secondary) search engines have picked it up the original site anyway
2) If I dont continue with this service will the main search engines (and secondary ones) pick up any changes or new pages I add ?

So in a nutshell - how does it work and am I paying for something I dont need ???

[E Business Advisors]

You dont need to submit your site to search engines. As long as your site has been listed by Google it will automatically be picked up by all of the popular search engines anyway.

[Ian J]

Most of the 500 sites are a waste of time as there are only a handful that really matter with Google leading the field.

Once the search engines discover your site they will periodically return and update their index without you having to do anything.