In this video, I’m going to show you how to submit your website to Google, Bing and
Yahoo.
Stay tuned.
[music]
Hey guys, it’s Joshua Hardwick here with Ahrefs and today, I have a website that I
want to submit to all of the major search engines.
That’s Google, Bing and Yahoo.
I know it’s not already indexed in any of those search engines because I did a “site”
search in both Google and Bing, and they each returned no results.
And because Yahoo pulls results from Bing, I also know that it’s not indexed there.
So let’s start with Google.
Now, until recently, the easiest way to submit a website or a webpage to Google was via their
URL submission tool.
You entered the URL, hit submit, and that was it.
But Google discontinued this tool in twenty-eighteen, so now the only way to submit a website is
by adding a sitemap in Google Search Console.
So first things first, you need to verify ownership of the website you want to submit
via Search Console.
I’ve already done that for this site.
If you haven’t done that for yours, check out the full blog post at
ahrefs.com/blog/submit-website-to-search-engines,
where you’ll find a link to a tutorial showing you how to do it.
You also need to create a sitemap, which again, I’ve already done, and uploaded to the root
folder on this domain.
So now, all I need to do is head to the sitemaps section in Search Console, enter my sitemap
URL, and hit submit.
And that’s it.
The website is now submitted to Google.
It’s worth noting that I’m using the new version of Search Console here.
If you’re still with the old one, you can find the same sitemaps section under the Crawl
heading on left-hand menu.
From thereon, the process is the same.
But what if you just want to submit, or resubmit, a single webpage to Google?
For that, you can use the Fetch as Google tool which is located under that same subheader.
Here you just need to enter the URL of the webpage you want to submit, hit “Fetch”
and then click the “Request indexing” button.
You’ll then see a modal window like this.
Confirm you’re not a robot, hit the "crawl this URL only" checkbox, hit “go,” and
you’re done.
This is a super inefficient way to submit lots of pages or an entire website to Google.
If that’s what you’re trying to do, use the sitemap option instead.
Now let’s move on to Bing.
Unlike Google, Bing still has a public URL submission tool, which you can find at
bing.com/toolbox/submit-site-url.
Here you can submit any website in seconds.
Just enter the homepage URL, fill in the captcha and hit “submit.”
But still, a much better option is to submit your sitemap via Bing webmaster tools, which
you can do at bing.com/webmaster/home/addsite.
You’ll be asked for your homepage and sitemap URLs, along with a few other bits of information
about you and your website.
Once you’ve filled in the form, hit submit and you’re done.
As I mentioned earlier, Yahoo pulls results from Bing so submission to Bing, results in
automatic submission to Yahoo.
Finally, if you want to check the index status of a particular website or webpage, go to
Google or Bing and type the “site” operator followed by the URL or root domain you want
to check.
If a result is returned, the website or webpage is indexed.
If not, there may be an issue.
You can learn more about the causes of these issues, how to fix them, and why submitting
your website to search engines won’t necessary result in a consistent stream of traffic to
your website in the full blog post at ahrefs.com/blog/submit-website-to-search-engines.