The biggest challenge for content creators is finding an audience in an increasingly saturated market. We already know that the vast majority of content online ends up getting no organic traffic from Google – according to an Ahrefs study based on the billions of pages in their database, this amounts to less than 4% of web pages in total.
But to even get traffic to your website from Google, Bing and other search engines, you need to make sure that your content is indexed and available for them to crawl. One way that you can ensure your site gets indexed is to submit your website manually to search engines.
Is It Really Necessary to Submit Your Site to Search Engines?
The truth is that for many websites, you probably don’t need to worry too much about submitting your site, as it’s likely that Google and other major search engines will crawl it without you needing to manually submit it yourself.
Over the years, web crawlers have become more powerful and efficient, allowing them to deal with the masses of content that’s posted on the web each day. They can also understand the content on each webpage much better too, which gives them the ability to filter out spam and better reward high quality content.
However, if you’re having indexing issues and want to make sure that search engines find important sections of your website, there’s literally no downside to doing so. If you’re someone that likes to have all bases covered, it’s best practice to ensure that your sitemap is available and submitted within your Google Search Console dashboard.
What does this do? Well, submitting your sitemap to search engines helps to ensure that they’ll crawl any updates and changes that you’ve made to your content. Plus, getting the hang of using Search Console – a free tool that allows you to monitor how your site performs in Google’s search results – is a good idea if you want to drive more organic traffic to your website.
We should add that in most cases when people ask how they can submit their website to search engines, they’re usually talking about their entire website. Though, you can also request individual pages be indexed, as well as checking their status as to whether Google has already indexed each specific URL – we’ll go through both methods here.
How to Submit Websites to Search Engines
First, you need to make sure that your website has an XML sitemap – this is a file that lists all of the pages on your website. You can likely find your sitemap generated at:
yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml
yourdomain.com/sitemap_index.xml
yourdomain.com/sitemap.php
This can vary depending on the Content Management System you’re using. You can also find it listed on your robots.txt file, which is located at yourdomain.com/robots.txt.
If you can’t find your sitemap, you’ll need to generate one, and the method for doing this is different based on whether you’re using WordPress, Webflow, Shopify or another CMS.
The majority of people use WordPress to create their website, so that’s what we’ll cover here.
Fortunately, creating an XML Sitemap in WordPress is pretty simple and can be done within a few clicks. Once your sitemap has been generated, you can then go ahead and submit it to Google.
Submit Your Sitemap in Google Search Console
Prior to submitting your site to Google Search Console, you need to add and verify your site ownership.
You can do this by going over to the Search Console tool, clicking Start Now, and then entering your domain – here, you’ll be presented with the opportunity to choose between Domain Property and URL Prefix.
The difference? Domain properties are more comprehensive and cover every variation of your website (e.g. https://domain.com, http://domain.com, https://www.domain.com, https://your.domain.com), but the verification method is a little more complex.
In comparison, URL prefix will just cover the specific variation you enter. This may be fine if you’re only using https://domain.com, and it’s much easier to verify domain ownership using this method.
Once you’ve finished getting your website verified, you can then submit it to Google Search Console. You’ll see the option to click “Sitemaps” on the left hand side under Indexing.
Next, find your sitemap URL and paste it into the “Add a new site map” field. Once done, you can go ahead and click “Submit.” In some cases, you may have more than one sitemap (you could have an additional news sitemap if you want to appear in Google News, for example) – several can be submitted here.
You can also inspect each URL individually within Search Console. This will tell you whether the page is indexed, and if it’s not, you can request indexing of your individual web pages one by one. This is useful if you’ve made changes on your page and want Google to crawl the new version ASAP.
Analyzing all of your website’s URLs individually can be a good idea if you have important pages that you need to ensure are indexed.
Submit Your Sitemap in Bing Webmaster Tools
Similar to Google, Bing has its own search console called Bing Webmaster Tools (Google’s tool also used to be called Google Webmaster Tools before changing the name to Google Search Console, whilst Bing maintained the original name).
The process of setting up Bing Webmaster Tools is pretty similar, and you can start by going to their webmasters page. You’ll be given the option to add your site manually with the same process as Google search console, or you can just import it directly from Google if you’ve already set that up.
You can then submit your sitemap to Bing in the same way as we did with Google Search Console – go ahead and select Sitemaps on the left, and then enter your sitemap URL before clicking Submit Sitemap.
Like Google, you also have the URL Inspection option within BWT allowing you to check the indexing status of specific URLs. This means if you’re having trouble with a specific page, you’ll be able to tell whether it’s indexed by using this feature.
Overall, because Bing Webmaster Tools allows you to submit your website pretty easily (and even has an import function directly from Google), it’s worth your time to take a few minutes to do so.
What about other major search engines?
We all know that Google is the most popular search engine in the world, with Bing coming in a distant second. But just because you have your site indexed in one search engine, that doesn’t automatically mean it’s indexed in all of them.
So, what other search engines should you submit your website to? Here are the main ones:
- Yahoo – To get your site to show up on Yahoo search, all you need to do is submit it to Bing. Yahoo search is actually powered by Bing and has been for more than a decade, so if you’ve set things up properly in BWT, you’ll be good to go for Yahoo too.
- DuckDuckGo – Another one that you don’t need to worry about is DuckDuckGo, as they automatically index the web by forming their search result pages using their 100s of partner sources, including DuckDuckBot (their web crawler), Bing, Wikipedia, and many others.
- Baidu – Baidu is still the main search engine in China. Head to Baidu Ziyuan (which translates as Baidu Resources in English) and follow a similar process as above if your website produces Chinese language content targeting the user base in China.
- Yandex – For Russian language websites, you’ll want to go to Yandex Webmaster Tools and submit your site there to ensure it ends up in front of your Russian-speaking audience.
These are the major search engines that are worth taking the time to make sure your website is indexed in. There are other international ones you may want to consider depending on the language and target audience, like Naver if you’re targeting a South Korean market, but the ones mentioned have the highest volume of searches globally and in their respective countries.
How can you know your site is on Google?
A basic site search in Google using the Site operator can usually tell you whether your website is indexed or not. Enter “site:yourdomain.com” into a Google search and see if your website shows up: for instance, here’s what shows for “site:passwordprotectwp.com”:
You can use the site command on your homepage or any internal page on your site to see your indexed URLs. As mentioned above, you can also search individual pages within the URL inspection tool to see if they’re indexed too.
How else can I ensure my website gets indexed?
If you’ve done the above and you find that some or all of the pages on your website aren’t indexing in Google, there are some strategies you can use to ensure your website gets indexed:
- Make sure that the page you want indexed is filled with quality content, not spam or thin content.
- Optimize the technical elements of your site, like making sure that your website is mobile friendly and loads within a few seconds.
- Create internal links between the pages on your website, ensuring a good website structure that allows users to navigate your pages easily.
- Get backlinks from other websites, letting search engines know that your content is valuable to other users (this can happen naturally with organic traffic when you have high quality content, but only once it’s indexed).
- Keep your content up-to-date, as fresh content is more likely to be crawled by Google than older content that may be outdated.
Keep an eye on how well your pages are indexing within Google Search Console. You also have the option to use professional SEO tools to monitor any technical errors too.
How to Discourage Your WordPress Site from Search Engines
Want to stop Google from crawling your website? There are times that you may need to block bots from crawling and indexing your site, like if you’re dealing with a staging site, private online seminar site, or even family blog that you don’t want to show up on search results.
You can deindex certain pages or the entire WordPress site from search engines using the Prevent Direct Access plugin to prevent access. Of course, we also recommend installing the PPWP Pro plugin to password protect your entire website and restrict access to specific users.
In the plugin’s Settings page, you will see the ‘Block Search Indexing’ option enabled by default. This feature allows you to stop search engines from indexing all your protected content. You can also click on the ‘Sitewide Protection’ option and turn on ‘Password Protect Entire Site’ to protect your whole website.
After providing your passwords in the ‘Set new passwords’ box, click ‘Save Changes.’ You can set unlimited passwords for your private site.
Conclusion
In reality, all you need to do is submit your sitemap to Google and Bing to ensure that your website is indexed and crawlable. This includes Yahoo whilst DuckDuckGo does this automatically, and remember to submit your site to Baidu or Yandex if you serve these markets.
There are a variety of different reasons why you need to submit your website to search engines, the most common of which being indexing issues. Hopefully, now you can make sure that your website is indexed and focus on what matters – creating user friendly web pages and crafting high quality content for your audience.
