SUBMITTING YOUR SITE AND PAGES TO GOOGLE AND OTHER SEARCH ENGINES DOESN’T NEED TO BE COMPLEX OR TAKE LONG, AND SO LONG AS YOU FOLLOW A FEW SIMPLE STEPS YOU’LL SEE YOUR URLS INDEXED IN NO TIME AT ALL.
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How to Check if a URL is Indexed
Before you go ahead and submit your URL to Google, it makes sense to run a quick check to establish whether or not it is already indexed.
You can do this by using Google Search Console’s URL Inspection Tool.
Use the ‘Inspect a URL’ search box at the top of the dashboard and enter the URL whose index status you want to check.
Once the data has been retrieved from the index, you will either see a confirmation that the page is on Google:
Or that the page is not on Google:
You will also be able to clearly see any coverage issues with that specific URL below this.
Your Options For Submitting a URL to Google
When it comes to submitting a URL to Google, you have a number of options. But first, it is important to understand that not all of these involve actually ‘submitting’ your site to the search engine.
Instead, you need to think of these methods as informing Google that your page (or site) exists. Let’s look at these options for getting your URL indexed (we will look at submitting a new website separately).
Request Indexing With the Inspect a URL Tool in Search Console
There is a good chance that you have just used the Inspect a URL tool to check whether or not your URL is in Google’s index. Perhaps the quickest way to get your URL in Google’s index is to do so through this tool.
Regardless of whether the URL is, or isn’t, in Google’s index, you will see a ‘REQUEST INDEXING’ link at the bottom of the box. Click this and your page will be added to a queue for indexing.
If there are any issues, you will be notified of them.
You will be able to check the index status of the page using the same tool, as we showed before.
Submit an Updated Sitemap to Google Search Console
When you submit an updated sitemap to Search Console and include new URLs, you are informing Google that there has been a change and that these pages should be crawled.
For reference, we are talking about an XML sitemap here, not an HTML sitemap.
If you are submitting for an existing site and want to see new URLs indexed as quickly as possible, you have likely already submitted a sitemap previously. Once you have added a sitemap, you might be surprised to find that you can’t actually go in and ‘resubmit’ in the new Search Console.
As Google Search Console help says:
Google doesn’t check a sitemap every time a site is crawled; a sitemap is checked only the first time that we notice it, and thereafter only when you ping us to let us know that it’s changed. You should alert Google about a sitemap only when it’s new or updated; do not submit or ping unchanged sitemaps multiple times.
— Google Search Console Help
The good news is that if you are using a platform such as WordPress combined with an SEO plugin, your sitemap will automatically update and ping Google when you publish a new page or post.
If you are not using WordPress, or another CMS where the sitemap automatically pings Google when updated, you can use the ‘ping’ functionality to ask for this to happen.
Send an HTTP GET request like this:
As an important side note, your XML sitemap should be referenced in your site’s robots.txt file.
Use Internal Links
As we mentioned before, Google doesn’t actually need you to submit a URL for it to be indexed, it just needs to be informed that it exists. It is a good time to point out here that one of the main ways Google finds new pages is through links.
If you add an internal link into another page on your site that Google already has in its index, this will help the new URL to be discovered. Of course, you should only add links where it makes sense to do so in topically relevant pages.
Link from an External Source
Just as Google finds new content by crawling internal links, the same goes for inbound links from external sources. Of course, earning links from a third-party website isn’t as simple or as quick as adding internal links, updating your sitemap or inspecting the URL with Search Console, but given that links are a top ranking factor, it is recommended that you consider various link building strategies that you could use to get other people to link to your new page.
How to Submit a Website to Google
If you are launching a brand new website for the first time, you will undoubtedly be wondering how you can get it included in Google’s index as quickly as possible. Let’s look at your options.
How to Check if a Website is Indexed
You can quickly check to see whether or not a website is indexed by Google straight on the search engine using the “site:”
Run a search for: site:[Your Domain]
e.g., site:yourdomain.com
If your website is indexed, you will see results returned when using this search operator.
As an example:
Notice both the number of returned results as well as the indexed URLs displayed? In the event that there are no URLs indexed for the domain, you will see:
When You Need To Submit a Website
Most commonly, you only need to submit your website to Google when you launch a site for the first time (because Google is not aware that it exists) or when you move your website to a new domain.
If you are working on an existing site, you shouldn’t need to submit the whole site if it is already been indexed.
There are, however, instances when you may need to do so as the result of an error; let’s say a developer accidentally added a rel=”noindex” tag across the site and you saw the site drop from the index.
How to Submit a Website to Google
The quickest and most effective way to submit a website to Google is to add an XML sitemap to Google Search Console.
You can do so by heading to the Sitemaps tab of Search Console.
You will now see the ‘Add a new sitemap’ box. Enter the extension of your site’s XML sitemap.
Once you have done this, you will see a list of submitted sitemaps and the number of discovered URLs:
How To Submit a Website or URL to Other Search Engines
It is important to remember that Google isn’t the only search engine, and you want to submit to other popular search engines people use, for example: Bing, Yahoo, Quant, and DuckDuckGo.
Next, we will look at how you can submit your site or website to each of them.
How to Submit a URL or Website to Bing
To submit your site or URL to Bing, you need to head over to Bing Webmaster Tools.
Once there, you first need to add your site, if you haven’t done so already. The good news is that you can skip verification and import straight from Google Search Console.
To submit a whole website, you can add your site’s XML sitemap, just as you did with Google.
Head to the sitemaps tab:
You will then see a ‘Submit Sitemap’ button in the top right of your screen that opens a popup. From here, you can enter the URL of your sitemap:
Unlike Google, you can click into a submitted sitemap and you will see a re-submit button in the top right of the page.
If you just want to submit a URL, you can do so using Bing’s URL submission tool that you will find as part of the left-hand menu.
Simply enter the full URL and hit submit.
How to Submit a URL or Website to Yahoo
If you have already followed the steps to submit your website to Bing, you have done everything that you need to do in order to submit it to Yahoo. Since 2010, Bing has powered Yahoo’s search results and the method of submitting to the search engine is simply to submit to Bing.
There is nothing else to do.
How to Submit a URL or Website to DuckDuckGo
As of May 2020, DuckDuckGo has an estimated market share of 1.35% in the US. This is still way behind Bing’s 6.5%, Yahoo’s 3.6% and Google’s 88%, but an increasing number of people are using the privacy-first search engine.
The good news is that you don’t need to submit your URL or website to DuckDuckGo. The search engine uses more than 400 sources for its results, including Bing’s search results, meaning that if you have submitted there, you don’t need to do anything else.
Glossary of Terms
- Bing Webmaster Tools: A free service supplied by Bing that allows webmasters to add their website to the search engine and see the performance.
- Google Search Console: Previously known as Google Webmaster Tools, this free tool allows webmasters to see and manage their site’s performance on the search engine.
- Google’s Index: Imagine Google’s index to be similar to an index in a library, but instead of books, this lists the web pages available to find on Google.
- Inbound Links: Links from other websites to your own.
- Internal Linking: Links between two pages on your own website.
- Site: Search Operator: A simple way to return a list of URLs available on Google for a particular domain.
- URL Inspection Tool: A tool available in Google Search Console that you can use to inspect the index status of a URL.
- URL Submission Tool: Bing’s tool that allows you to submit new URLs to the index.
- XML Sitemap: An XML sitemap that is submitted to a search engine informs the key pages that should be indexed.
Thank you to J. Barnard at SEMRush Blog for sharing this detailed information.
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