How to Submit a Website to Search Engines

SEO Guide Step 8

Search Engine Submission: only if you are in the search engine index can you show in their search results. To do that you need to make the content worthy, then put it where a search engine spider will find it. Sometimes via submission, and sometimes via obvious discovery methods.

Stay in the Index: but even if you are spidered the search engine may exclude you from the index. This is commonly because the page is low quality, or it has identified spam, or it has been identified as containing malware, or it has a terrible link profile, or your site does not link to it, or any of hundreds of other reasons.

Lets assume your page is worthy…

Once you’ve done the on-page work to optimize your website, it’s time to invite the search engines!

In this SEO Guide lesson, you learn how to submit your website to Google and Bing. We’ll also cover the situations that call for sending the search engine spiders an invitation to come crawling.

Why Submit a Site Manually?

It’s optional to submit a site manually. Search engine spiders discover most webpages automatically by following links. So even if you do not submit site URLs to Google and Bing directly, the search engines will most likely find them eventually.

It’s more important to make sure the spiders can access all the pages within your site once they arrive. (This is why the next lessons explain XML sitemaps and other technical SEO tips to keep your site running smoothly.)

Still, there are times when manually submitting your content to a search engine can help.

When should you submit a website to search engines?

Directly submitting your URLs to a search engine is a good idea in cases like these:

• Brand new site:  If you are launching a new website or subdomain, submit your main page URLs directly. Doing so may get the new pages crawled and indexed sooner. The search engine spiders are likely to crawl the links on those pages to discover the rest of your site, too.
• Updated page: If you make substantial changes to a page, submit the URL. This can speed up indexing compared to waiting for the search engine spiders’ next visit (which could take weeks or longer, depending on the site).
• Incomplete indexing: If you have webpages that for some reason have never made it into the search engine index, you can submit the specific page URLs. (TIP: To see if a page has been indexed, do an exact match search. Copy a long text snippet from your page and search for it within quotation marks. If the results include your page, it’s indexed.)

Before you submit a site, it’s a good time to check on its “crawl-ability.” Use the free Check Server Page tool below to detect any redirects (a 301 is OK, but other types are not recommended) and any technical issues that may prevent your site from appearing in search results.

SEO Tools – Check Server Page

How to Submit Webpages to Google

Follow these instructions to submit specific pages (URLs) to Google for index consideration.

You can submit up to 10 page URLs per day through Search Console.

Google takes your submission as just a suggestion, of course. But it does draw Google’s attention to your pages and should speed up Googlebot’s arrival.

Here’s how to submit URLs to Google …

1. Log in to Google Search Console and select the desired website property. (Here’s how you can set up Google Search Console for your website.)
2. From the menu, choose URL inspection.
3. Type the URL of the webpage you want Google to crawl (must be in the selected site). Press Enter.
4. The URL Inspection report displays the latest crawl data for this page. Next, click Request Indexing.
5. After Google tests the URL to make sure it exists, you will see the message “Indexing requested.” Click Got it to close the dialog box.

If you want to submit your WHOLE website to Google, you have to follow a different procedure. The next lesson shows you how to create a sitemap and submit it through Search Console.

Note: Google temporarily disabled the Request Indexing feature from October 14 to December 22, 2020, while updating its index.

How to Submit a Site to Bing (and Yahoo)

You can submit up to 10,000 webpage URLs per day to Bing. When you submit your site to Bing, you also submit the website to Yahoo automatically since Bing feeds Yahoo’s web search index.

Here’s how to submit a site to Bing …

1. Sign in to Bing Webmaster Tools. (We recommend setting up a Bing Webmaster Tools account. Fortunately, it’s easy to do. If you already have Google Search Console, Bing can pull your verification info from there.)
2. Select the appropriate website if you have more than one.
3. From the menu, choose Configure My Site > Submit URLs.
4. Type or paste in the URLs you want to submit for indexing from the website, one per line.
5. Click Submit.

Note: Bing used to offer a way to submit pages without a login. That tool was retired in September 2018.

Bing also offers the ability to submit URLs using their URL Submission API, which is part of the Bing Webmaster API.

Search Engine Submission Reminders

Remember that there is no guarantee your pages will be indexed right away. According to Search Console Help, “Indexing typically takes only a day or so, but can take much longer in some cases.” Still, manual submission should bring the search engine spiders to your new content faster and give you the best chance to have your webpages indexed quickly.

Now that you know how to submit your webpages to Google and Bing, we’ll move on to creating XML sitemaps — an all-important and simple way to make sure the search engines can find your pages for indexing.

Next Lesson

Related articles:

• How to Submit a Reconsideration Request to Google
• Keep Your Server Running Its Best with the Check Server Page Tool