Submitting a new web site to a wide range of search engines may no longer be necessary, because the major search engines today are very efficient and will very likely find a new sites rather quickly. We have developed a number of new web sites that the major search engines began visiting in a matter of days with no assistance or submissions on our part.
This is not always the rule, however, and there are times when submitting a new site will help the search engines find it more quickly. If you wish to submit a site, you only need to submit the site’s home page one time to each of the three major search engines, Google, MSN and Yahoo. Almost all the other search engines will pick up and index the site in a few months due to the many affiliations and data sharing agreements among the search engine companies. There is never a need to repeatedly submit a site and in some cases it may be viewed as search engine spam and the site could be penalized.
How to determine if a site is already indexed
It’s easy to see if any of the big three search engines have already picked up a site. There is a simple query code that can be entered in each search engine’s search box. The resulting page will display a list of every page within the site that is in the search engine’s database.
Enter the following query code in a search box in Google, MSN or Yahoo. Make sure that you substitute the site’s domain name and do not use any spaces.
site:mydomainname.com
Paging through the results will display all the pages that have been indexed by the search engine.
Submission links
If you find any pages in the site listed in the three major search engines and the MSN beta engine, you do not need to do anything else. If the site and the linking structure are properly constructed, once a search engine has indexed a single page its spiders will find all of the pages.
If the site is not listed in one or more of the search engines, you may wish to submit the site to those engines using the following links. Be sure to read the instructions on each submission page.
MSN Search – Submit Your Site (now called Bing)
Tips for submitting
- Follow the instructions on the submission pages.
- Submit a standardized version of your URL. If you plan to use http://www.mydomainname.com as your standard URL format, do not submit http://mydomainname.com.
- Don’t get anxious and start resubmitting if the site is not indexed in a few days. It sometimes takes a while for a spider to visit a site.
- Be aware that Google will sometimes not fully index a new Web site until it achieves a number of inbound links from other sites. There is also a ranking delay some sites experience that is referred to as the Google Sandbox Effect.
An important directory to submit to
A directory differs from a search engine in that a directory uses teams of people to view and rank a web site, rather than an automated spider. The Open Directory Project, also called DMOZ, is a free directory that has been used by a number of search engines and directories as a source of seed data. It is therefore worthwhile to have a site listed in this directory. But because DMOZ uses volunteer editors and receives a large number of submissions, it can take anywhere from a few months to two years to get listed in this directory. Due to the nature of the volunteer review teams at DMOZ, many sites never get listed. Nonetheless, it is worthwhile to spend the time to submit a site to DMOZ. Look for the Suggest URL link and follow the instructions.
Submitting a site is really a simple process. Once the site has been submitted, you can monitor the progress using the “site:” query code mentioned above. You can also use any good server log analysis software to monitor search engine spider visits.
