If search engines have no idea that your website exists, your website ranking chances have no improbability. It is an impossibility. With the sudden boom in the digital market and e-commerce, your customers and clients must know that you exist on the internet, and for that, the search engines must recognize you.
If this didn’t happen yet, it’s is an excellent time to submit your website to search engines and a fresh start with your digital business.
Why Should You Submit Your Website to Search Engines?
A general question that most people ask when it comes to website submission on a different search engine do they need to submit their website to the search engines. It is not compulsory, but it can always help search engines discover your site faster.
Search engines like Google never wholly rely and depend on manual submission. The primary method of the search engine to find new web pages and websites is through crawling. By crawling, computer programs keep on checking well-known sites for new content and new links.
They will add any valuable content to their index. This means they will probably find your site on their own. So, why should you submit your website to search engines at all?
There are few benefits of submitting your website to the search engines
- Why risk it: It is quick and easy to submit your site, so it is better to be safe than sorry that search engines are not finding your site.
- Give them additional information: It is beneficial to keep them updated about your content changes.
- Improve your site: By submitting your website to Bing and Google, you can enjoy free tools to improve your site.
How Do You Submit Your Website to Search Engines?
Bing and Google have discontinued the tool called URL submission back in 2018. The only way now to submit your website is through submitting your sitemap to these search engines.
For search engines like Yahoo and DuckDuckGo, you don’t need to submit your website.
Find the sitemap of your website at one of the following URLs:
yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml
If you don’t find the sitemap of your website over there, check out the robots.txt file from yourwebsite.com/robots.txt. Most sites list down the location of their website’s sitemap there.
If you still don’t find your website’s sitemap from the options above, chances are you don’t own a sitemap, and for that, you have to create one before proceeding.
Here’s how you can create one: type in the query “How to create a sitemap,” and you will find tons of step-by-step tutorials to create one. Follow the steps written, and you’ll be able to create a sitemap quite easily.
Once you have a sitemap, Here are the official website submission methods to submit your site to search engine:
- submit your website to Google search engine
- submit the website to DuckDuckgo
- Submission via Bing
- Submit your website to Yahoo
- Submit your website to Baidu
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How to Submit Your Website to Google Search Engine?
Let’s start with Google first. It is essential to submit your site to the top search engine – Google. For that, you will have to add and verify your site to the Google Search Console. After that, follow these steps:
- Log in to your Google Search Console
- From the left menu, click on the “Sitemap”
- Paste the URL of your sitemap
- Submit it.
- Repeat this process if you have multiple sitemaps.
You can also submit a single page to Google by pasting the URL of your page to the URL Inspection tool of your Search Console. If the page is not indexed, you will see the warning “URL is not on Google.”
To request Google to index the page and crawl, you have to click “Request indexing.” Once the page is indexed, you will receive the confirmation “URL is on Google.”
How to Submit the Website to DuckDuckgo?
DuckDuckGo is one of the top privacy-oriented search engines, and also it doesn’t allow submitting a website on its search engine. It does the job of discovering and indexing websites by itself from its four hundred sources, including their web crawler – DuckDuck Bot and other partners like Bing, Wikipedia, etc.
You don’t have to do anything here to get your website submitted other than to submit it on Bing.
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Submission via Bing Webmaster Tools:
Here are few simple steps to submit your site to Bing:
- Log in to the Bing Webmaster Tools.
- Click on the sitemaps from the left menu
- Paste the URL of your sitemap over there
- Click on the “Submit sitemap”
- You have to repeat the process if you have multiple sitemaps.
Submit Your Website to Yahoo:
Yahoo is powered by Bing’s index. That is why when you submit your website to Bing, it will automatically submit your website to Yahoo. You don’t have to do any additional work here.
Submit Your Website to Baidu:
If you have your target audience in China, you only need to submit your website to Baidu because it has 66%+ market shares in China. But the process of submitting your website on Baidu is quite convoluted, and you need an entire guide for this. You can search other guides to submit your website on Baidu in case you are interested.
Check Your Site Is Indexed or Not?
Other than submitting your site to the search engine, it is equally essential to check whether the website is indexed or not. Many guides suggested checking the status of your indexing through site:yourwebsite.com for Google.
However, it is not reliable and doesn’t reveal that the website or page is indexed. It is recommended to check the reliability of the indexing status from the tools provided by that particular search engine.
Check Google Indexing Status
In Search Console, head towards the Coverage report Select the Tab “Valid”. Now you can see the lists under the details to check your indexed URLs. You can also use the URL Inspection Tool to check the index status of a particular URL
Check Bing Indexing Status:
You can simply use Site Explorer to filter the URLs which are indexed. You can also explore all the indexed pages of your website. To check any particular or single web page, do it through the URL Inspection tool.
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Fix Your Indexing Issues
If your webpage or the website is not yet indexed, the first thing you have to do is find out why. You cannot fix this problem until you know what you missed or went wrong.
Firstly, paste the URL you want to check in the URL Inspection tool of Google and check for any coverage error.
Some common issues that you will find in the Search Console are given below, along with their meanings:
Blocked by robots.txt
This issue is caused because your webpage or website is blocked by robots.txt, and Google cannot access and crawl those pages. To resolve it remove the block and submit it again.
Excluded by Tag ‘noindex’
This issue is caused by the robots Meta tags noindex, which blocks Google indexing that page. To resolve this issue, remove it from the page and try submitting again.
Redirect Page
Google never indexes those pages which are redirected; therefore, if you want to get your page indexed, remove it from redirecting.
Duplicate Without the Canonical of User-select
If Google believes that a particular page has duplicate content, it won’t index it. Instead, it indexes its canonical. Usually, this is not a big deal, but you can investigate it further if you think your page should be indexed.
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Why Just Submitting and Indexing Your Site Is Not Enough
Google gives hundreds and thousands of search results, but many believe that almost nobody goes beyond the first page and clicks the results from the second, third, and so on pages.
Considering it, getting your website submitted and indexed on different search engines is not enough.
If you want traffic on your website, you have to get it ranked on the Google or search engine’s first page. However, getting on the first page is not enough as the first three sites listed in the search results get the most traffic.
As per a study, most users overwhelmingly click the very first result. That is why if you want more traffic, get your target keywords ranked on Google and other search engines as top as you can.
Wrapping It Up
If you are a beginner just starting your online business journey, you must submit your website to different search engines. Remember this, an online business is only as good as its marketing and SEO strategies, and submitting your website to different search engines is a good start! After that, you can focus on your SEO strategies and extend the reach of your business.