Submitting Website to Search Engines
Introduction
Theoretically, search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo, are constantly crawling the web to find websites to index, hence there is not a must for you to submit your website to search engines.
However, it is still worth to manually submit your website to search engines because
- Peace of mind - You can 100% sure that your website is indexed properly and visible in search result by providing your site map.
- Improvement opportunities - You can access free tools and reports from search engines that can help you optimize your website and fix any issues.
By personal experience, you may be surprised to see lots of blog posts may have been discovered or crawled but not indexed in Google Search.
- Hence, you may still have to manually request indexing in Google Search Console.
NOTE: Submitting your website to search engines does not guarantee that it will be indexed or ranked high in search results. There are many factors that affect how search engines rank websites, including the quality of your content, the number of backlinks you have, and the keywords you use.
How to Submit
The main search engines that you should submit your website to are Google and Bing as they cover most of the market share and also power other search engines like Yahoo.
- Google through Google Search Console
- Bing and Yahoo through Bing Webmaster Tools
In both webmaster tools, you first have to create an account and verify your ownership of the website.
- Then, go to Sitemaps on the left menu, paste in your sitemap URL, then hit submit.
Enable Visible to Search Engines in Google Blogger
Do not forget to allow search engines to find your blog in Settings > Visible to Search Engines
Uploading a Sitemap to Google Search Console
To submit your sitemap to Google Search Console, you need to have a verified account and property for your blog.
Then, go to Sitemaps on the left menu, paste your sitemap URL in the box and click Submit.
Check Page Index in Google Search Console
To check if how many webpages are being in indexed, you may head to the Pages in Google Search Console.
You may also identify the categories for why certain URL are not being indexed here.
- Reasons include Discovered - currently not indexed, Crawled - currently not indexed, Page with redirect, Alternate page with proper canonical tag and Soft 404.
Once the issue is fixed, you should then select the URL and manually click request indexing.
- You will see a confirmation message saying "Indexing requested" when it is done.
Alternatively, you may also check the status of a particular URL using the URL Inspection Tool.
Site Scan in Bing Webmaster Tools
Site Scan in Bing Webmaster Tools is an on-demand site audit tool that crawls your site and check for common technical SEO issues.
- To start a new scan, go to the Site Scan feature in Bing Webmaster Tools and click on "Start new scan" button.
- After the scan is complete, you will get a report with the issues found, their severity and how to fix them (such as missing meta description tag or image ALT tag).
NOTE: Ahrefs provides a more comprehensive site audit than Bing Webmaster Tools.
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