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How to Submit your Website to Google - Step by Step Guide

1012 words · Reading time: 5 minutes
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If you’ve recently built a website and you’re wondering why you can’t find it when you look on Google, then you’ve come to the right place. With millions of websites created every day, Googlebot has a big task on its hands when it comes to indexing them all. In this guide, we’ll show you how to speed things up, by submitting your website to Google manually.

Once you’ve built your website and spent ages polishing it to make sure it’s ready for the eye’s of the world to see, you’re going to click publish and “Hey Presto!” it’s live. Now you can sit back, relax and watch as millions of visitors flood in to enjoy your content. If only it were that simple.

Expecting visitors to come to your site straight away without telling Google is a bit like expecting people to come to your party on time without telling them what time it starts.

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If you do want your visitor to show up on time, you’ll need to invite Googlebot over.

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Inviting Googlebot to visit your site is fairly simple and it will make sure that you get noticed and indexed sooner.

How does Google find your Website?

When it comes to adding new websites to its list, Google enrols the help of it’s GoogleBot

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Googlebot is Google’s ‘webcrawler’, which is split into mobile and desktop crawlers. These two webcrawlers simulate users browsing the internet, and compile all of the new information they find into Google’s index. Googlebot does this by using existing URLs which have already been crawled and then looks for new sites, pages, updates and links.

You can also tell Google about all of the pages on your site using a sitemap. If new pages are included in your sitemap, Google will discover them and crawl the content, potentially listing them within their search results. To do this, Google bases on its evaluation of over 200 criteria.

After Googlebot has finished its crawling process, all of the results are logged in Google’s index. Google will look at your page information including meta descriptions, title tags etc. However, Googlebot finds it more difficult to read dynamic content such as JavaScript, so will use the default HTML version. It’s therefore, a good idea to make sure your default website data is fully optimised to help with the search.

If you don’t submit your site to Google, they will eventually get round to doing it, but it will take much longer. If you’re an affiliate marketer and need to get things done quickly (time is money after all) then it’s a good idea to submit your website to Google to get faster results.

If you’re not sure whether or not your site has been crawled, then it is possible to check using your URL and entering site: before your site name. For example, to check our blog we can just type site:convertingteam.com/blog into Google and they will provide all of the indexed pages.

How to Submit your Website to Google

In order to submit your website to Google, the first thing you’ll need to do is visit Google Webmasters. From there you need to click on ‘sign in’ in the top right corner of the screen.

The Google Webmaster ‘sign in’ doesn’t require a Google account so it’s not exactly a ‘sign in’ page, but that’s what they call it. The sign in button will take you to a page which looks like this:

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You have two options. You can either use your Domain or your URL Prefix.

Here is Google’s table highlighting the differences:

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The URL prefix is a little less complicated to set up, but the new Domain feature is more versatile and better in the long run. Also, if you own the domain and have access to an account by your domain name provider e.g. GoDaddy.com, we would recommend using Domain. For the purposes of this example, we’re going to use Domain.

To set it up, enter your domain in the dialogue window above and hit ‘Continue’

Google will provide a text record that you should copy into your DNS configuration. It sounds complicated, but don’t worry, it’s not.

You’ll need to log in to your domain name provider account. Once there, find your provider in this list by Google and follow the step-by-step instructions.

After you have finished adding the DNS text record, go back to Search Console and hit ‘Verify’. If it doesn’t work, allow some time for the records to be updated and try again in a day or so.

When you verify your domain successfully, your overview page will open in Google Search Console. You have two options now to submit URLs to Google. You can submit individual pages or you can add a sitemap so that Google has the whole roadmap covered.

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If you click the URL inspection button, the search field in the top will be highlighted and you can input the address which you want Google to index.

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After checking the index, Google will return the verdict. You’ll then be able to ‘REQUEST INDEXING’ if your page has changed or Google doesn’t have in their index.

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Another way to check if your pages are in Google’s index is to hit ‘Sitemaps’ in the left menu. In this section, you can add a new sitemap and check how many pages from your sitemap are indexed. If some aren’t, Google will provide you with the reasons why. To get this information, simply click on a submitted sitemap, and select ‘See Index Coverage’.

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Submitting a sitemap will request indexing for all of your pages in the sitemap in bulk, so you don’t have to worry about missing any. As the sitemap gets updated, Google regularly checks for changes and adds new pages from your live sitemap to the index.

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For more information about how to boost your site with Google and maximize your organic traffic check out these related articles:

Google Analytics and Bounce Rates: How to Analyse your Site’s Performance

Speed Matters: How to Boost your Site’s Performance

What is Google’s Disavow Tool?

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