Submit a Website to Search Engines

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.

If you have just launched a new website, on a brand new domain, you are not going to see it ranking on Google straight away. Until Google and other search engines know that your website exists, you won’t even see it indexed.

For those of you reading this guide because you have published a new website and can’t figure out why you can’t find it anywhere, let’s quickly explain how search engines work.

Let’s turn to Google’s own ‘how search works‘ guide to help with this…

Even before you search, Google organises information about webpages in our Search index. The index is like a library, except that it contains more info than in all the world’s libraries put together.

If your website isn’t in Google’s index, it won’t be able to be found when a user makes a search. Google needs to know that your site exists to be able to crawl it and include it in its index.

In this guide, you will learn how to submit your site to Google and other search engines, as well as understand other ways that they can discover it.

Here are the different resources offered in this guide:

Do I Need to Manually Add a New URL or My Website to Google?
How Long Will It Take Google to Index My Website or URL?
How to Submit a URL to Google
How to Submit a Website to Google
How To Submit a Website or URL to Other Search Engines
Glossary of Terms

Do I Need to Manually Add a New URL or My Website to Google?

The good news is that submitting your website isn’t a specific requirement for your website to appear in Google’s index, but, for a new website, it is often the fastest way.

Google just needs to know that your website exists. From there, it can crawl the site and index its pages.

Google’s crawlers find new URLs (and websites) by following links from other pages and websites. As long as your site is linked to from somewhere else on the web, Google will eventually find and index your site, but you can speed this up by manually submitting a new site.

When it comes to a new URL (page or post) that has been published on an existing website, you certainly don’t need to go through the process of manually submitting it, but there are steps that you can take to speed up seeing the page in Google’s index.

You don’t need to manually submit your site or page to Google as long as it’s linked to from somewhere else on the web, but doing so can speed up the process of the search engines finding your content.

How Long Will It Take Google to Index My Website or URL?

There is no set length of time that it takes for Google to index your website or URL. That said, what we can all be confident about is that this is a lot faster than it once was.

A study by HubSpot found that, without submitting a new URL to Google through a sitemap, it took Google an average of 1,375 minutes to crawl the page (that is 23 hours). However, when submitting an updated sitemap to Google Search Console, this dropped to just 14 minutes.

Leaving Google to find new content on its own can result in delays where your page isn’t indexed, but it takes just minutes when you manually inform Google.

On the other hand, the time taken to crawl and index a completely new domain can differ significantly, depending on whether or not any external links exist and how frequently these themselves are crawled.

At the very least you need to make sure you submit a new site to Google; doing so for a new page can speed up the indexation.

How to Submit a URL to Google

The general consensus is that yes, you should be submitting your URL or new website to Google – if only to speed up seeing it in the index.

There are different ways that you can do this, depending on the circumstances, and we will walk you through these options below.

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.