Way back when in the olden days of Search Engine Optimization, search engines had submission forms that were part of the SEO process. Webmasters would add keyword information to their website pages using the meta keyword tag, and “submit” their site to the search engines. Soon after submission, a bot would crawl the site and include those pages in the search engine’s index. Abracadabra, easy SEO!
Unfortunately, the process of submission was neither scalable nor effective, the submissions were often spam and filled with irrelevant keywords by webmasters trying to get a leg up in the results. The practice of submission soon gave way to crawl-based search engines. Since 2001, not only is search engine submission not required, it is effectively useless. The main search engines like Google and Bing are clear to state that they rarely use submission URLs and the best practice is to earn links from other sites. This will help your website get found by the search engines naturally.
Links earned from popular websites will get your site indexed most quickly. The search engine crawlers visit popular sites regularly, in some cases as often as 2 or 3 times a day. When at those websites the crawlers follow all outbound links they find, indexing each page they arrive at. When you get linked to by a popular site (Hint: Google+) your website can get indexed in a matter of hours or days.
“We have found that linking to a web page from a Google+ profile or post, gets a new web page indexed very fast”
A second step, which is not required, but highly recommended, is setting up a Google and Bing Webmaster account. A webmaster account allows the respective search engine to communicate to your recommendations for improving your site’s search engine performance, along with any problems they may have encountered crawling your site. The act of setting up and verifying your site with Google and Bing Webmaster accounts is the equivalent of submitting your site using the traditional submission form.
How to check if your site is listed in the search engines
You can see which of your website’s pages have been indexed in the search engine by typing into the search field the following:
site:yourdomain.com
The results returned are all pages the search engine (in the example above Google), has in its index for your website.
Whilst you can still find submission pages (here’s one for Bing), the notion that you need to submit your site to the search engines is just another SEO myth.
If you hear a pitch from an SEO Company offering “search engine submission” services, scarper as fast as you can to a real SEO provider. Even if the search engines used the submission service to crawl your site, you’d be unlikely to earn enough “link juice” to be included in their indices or rank competitively for your business terms.
That perhaps is where the confusion lies. Getting your website indexed in the search engines does not mean you will automatically rank for your business terms. You cannot submit your site to search engines and tell them that you want to be ranked for this keyword term or that keyword term.
Ranking high in search engines results from search engine optimisation, the process of optimising your website to increase it’s relevancy and authority around particular terms.
Conclusion
You do not need to submit your website to the search engines using submission forms. Within time, your website will get indexed automatically, but you can speed up the process by earning links from popular sites or by verifying your site through a Webmaster account. Any SEO company offering Search Engine Submission services is not only wasting your money, but their own time and I recommend you avoid them, full-stop.
Have you come across an SEO still pushing this pointless service?
The post Why You Don’t Need To Submit Your Site To Search Engines appeared first on SEO Sherpa.