Owning a website without letting the search engines informed about it is like, having a Smartphone without an internet connection. If search engines don’t know about your existing website, there is the least chance of ranking your site. Therefore, the very first thing that you need to do is to index your new website.
After indexing, a new website is not going to appear instantly on the search engines. That means, if you search for a one or two-day-old website in Google, chances are there that you will be disappointed.
Even after a few weeks of going live, you may not find your website in Google, Yahoo, and Bing. If you are experiencing the same and want to know how to submit your website to the search engines in the fastest way possible, then this content is for you.
Before knowing how to submit your website, you need to understand whether you have to submit your website to search engines or not.
The search engines were not designed for manual submission, they do their work by crawling the web and following your website. Crawling is simply a way the search engines look for new links on websites and follow them. If a meaningful link is discovered, the search engines add them to the index.
Google looks to different data sources, like Chrome browser usage statistics and domain registration data, to aid in their never-ending pursuit and webpages.
We can say that the search engines are smart enough to find new websites and webpages on their own, whether or not you submit them manually.
1.Why Should You Still Submit Your Site Or Webpages To The Search Engines?
Irrespective of knowing the fact that Google can discover pages on its own, there are a few reasons that prove that manual submission still plays a big role. They are –
- Play safe:
The fact is, search engines will probably be able to find your website, no matter you have submitted it manually or not. But do you really think depending on “probability” is a good idea? I mean, when you can submit your site in just one to two minutes, then why not? After all, it’s better to be safe than sorry. - Search engines can’t discover everything via crawling:
Let’s face it. The search engines are nothing but robots. They might skip some valuable information about your site. When you do it manually, you can tell them how important your pages are. They could not obtain this information by crawling. - Manual submission boosts your website:
Google and Bing offer some insights as to how they view your website in their respective management dashboards. There are different tools for testing your web pages, and they will alert you if any potential problems or errors happen on your site.
Submitting your website manually increases the chance of getting visible earlier without missing any important information. So, don’t let a single opportunity go to!
2. How to submit your website?
You don’t need to be an expert to submit your website to Google. After Google discounted their URL submission tool back in July 2018, the only way to submit your website is by adding your sitemap in Search Console.
If you are new to this and don’t know what sitemap is, then let me explain, a sitemap is basically a file that lists all the pages on a website. It is also known as the XML site.
- What to do to submit an individual webpage to Google?
If you want to submit an individual webpage to Google, you have to copy the URL and paste it into the URL inspection tool in Google Search Console. If the URL is not automatically indexed by Google, you will find no result. If you see the “URL is not on Google”, click the “Request indexing” button and request Google to crawl and index the page.This can be a great practice for the content you have recently updated or republished.
3. How to submit your website to Bing and Yahoo:
Previously, Bing had a public URL submission tool, which stopped working after September 2018. Now, you can submit a sitemap in Bing Webmaster Tools.
At first, go to Webmaster Tools> click on “add your site”> fill in the form and> click on the submit button.
Since Yahoo is powered by Bing index, you need to do nothing to submit your site on Yahoo. By submitting it to Bing, you automatically submit it to Yahoo.
4. How to check if your site is indexed?
To check whether your site is indexed or not, you have to go to the Google Search Console and check the Coverage report. Now, look at the “Valid” tab. Here, you will find the number of pages that Google has indexed from your site. You can also see the indexed page by clicking “Indexed, not submitted in sitemap” or “Submitted and indexed” links just below the Details section.
- To check if a particular webpage is indexed or not, you can follow this:
You can use the URL inspection tool in the Search Console search Google for site:yourdomain.com/the page name you want to check
If you find no results, means the page is still not indexed.
5. What should you do if your website is not indexed?
Well, before solving the issue, you have to find out the problem, I mean, why it is still not indexed. To find this out, you can simply paste your website URL into the URL inspection tool in Search Console and find out the “Coverage error”.
The reason might be anything. It can be due to a noindex tag on the page. Whatever the reason is, solve it and index it again.
6. Ways to follow to make Google index your site:
- Remove crawl blocks in your sitemap or robots.txt file. To check this issue, you can go to yourdomain.com/robots.txt.
- Remove rogue noindex tags. If you don’t tell Google to index your site, it will not. This is helpful when you want to keep some pages private. However, you can remove the noindex tags to make Google index your site.
- Make sure you have included your pages in your sitemap. By including your pages in your sitemap, you make it easier for Google to index your site.
- Remove rogue canonical tags. A good canonical tag tells Google that the page is the only and the preferred version, and you want this page to be indexed. However, if you have a rogue canonical tag, it might show that the page does not exist. So, removing rogue canonical tags is a must.
- Check that the page is not orphaned. If there is no internal linking pointing to a particular page, it is considered as orphaned. Since Google explores new content by crawling the web, if your page does not have any internal linking, neither Google nor any visitor would find the site.
- Google does not crawl the nofollow links. So, if you want a page to be indexed, make sure you fix nofollow internal links.
- Add meaningful and powerful internal links so that Google can find your site easily when it crawls the web.
- Make the page relevant with the link and the content unique. Google is least interested to index a site with low-quality pages.
- Build high-quality backlinks. Backlinks tell Google that the page is valuable. When your site gets backlinks from an authority site, it tends to become more reliable to Google.
- The search engines will find your site, even if you don’t tell them manually. But, to make the process smoother and faster, you can request Google or other search engines to crawl your site and index it. When your site is indexed, you go one step ahead to boost your online presence.