How to Submit Your Website to Search Engines (Free)

What submitting to search engines means now

You put up a new site. The search engines don't know it exists yet. You go tell them.

Ten-plus years ago this was a real form. Google had an "Add URL" page. You typed in the address, hit submit, done. Bing had one too. Back then a new site that didn't submit could sit for months without a single crawl.

It's different now. Google pulled that page in 2018. The reason it gave was that its crawler is fast enough to find you through links. That's half true. If your site has backlinks, it'll get found without submitting. If it has none, nobody comes, and it can sit for weeks.

So today "submitting to search engines" means a few concrete things. You claim your domain in each engine's webmaster console. You hand it a sitemap. Then you request indexing for the few pages that matter most. All of it is free. Each engine takes about twenty minutes.

One thing to be clear on. This only controls indexing, not ranking. Indexed means the engine has your page in its database and you show up when someone searches your domain. Ranking is where you land when someone searches a keyword. That's a separate system driven by content and links, and it has nothing to do with whether you submitted.

Does it still matter

Depends on the situation.

New site, no backlinks at all. Yes, do it. Google may not visit this kind of site for weeks. Submit, and you'll usually see the homepage indexed in three days to two weeks.

New site, a few backlinks already. Still do it. Google would find you anyway, but without a console you can't see indexing status or what went wrong. The real value of Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools isn't the submit button. It's seeing which pages got indexed, which got blocked, and why.

Older site, want a new page indexed fast. Do it. Page-by-page indexing requests exist for exactly this. Usually one or two days.

Hoping submitting will lift your rankings. Don't bother. It won't. Submitting only makes the engine aware of you. Ranking needs links, and there's a section later on where to go post them.

One more case worth its own line. If your site is for Chinese users, you'll want Baidu. Baidu's process is clunkier than Google's. It wants a phone number, site verification, and it crawls overseas servers slowly. But a site hosted outside China that doesn't submit to Baidu will basically never get indexed there. So for Chinese-language sites, that step isn't optional.

Three things to fix first

Check these before you submit anything, or the submission does nothing.

Have a sitemap.xml. It's an XML file listing every page on your site, at your domain root, like yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml. Most frameworks and CMSs generate it on their own now. Open the URL and see if it's there. If not, Next.js, WordPress and Hugo all have a plugin or config for it. Ten minutes.

Make sure robots.txt and noindex aren't blocking you. This is the number one way new sites blow it. During development someone adds a noindex tag or writes Disallow: / in robots.txt so the staging site stays out of Google, then forgets to remove it at launch. Weeks go by with nothing indexed, and it turns out you blocked yourself. Before launch, open yourdomain.com/robots.txt and check the homepage source for noindex.

Have at least one real backlink. Not required, but it makes a big difference. A domain with zero links pointing at it gets its homepage indexed and then rarely gets crawled again. Post one link somewhere, say Pearltrees or Diigo. Takes a few minutes, and the crawler comes around a lot more often.

The engines, one by one

Google: Search Console

Around 90% of the world's searches happen here, so start here.

1. Open Search Console, sign in with a Google account, click "Add property."
2. Pick the "Domain" type and type your domain. It gives you a DNS TXT record to add at your DNS provider. This is the least fuss: one verification covers http, https, www and non-www. If you can't touch DNS, pick "URL prefix" instead and verify by uploading an HTML file or adding a meta tag.
3. Once verified, find "Sitemaps" in the left menu and submit the URL of your sitemap.xml.
4. Go to the search bar at the top, paste your homepage URL, wait for the check to finish, then click "Request indexing."
5. Repeat step 4 for your three to five most important pages.

Step 4 has a quota. Google doesn't publish the number, but in practice it's around ten requests per property per day. After that it tells you to come back tomorrow. So don't use it to push the whole site. Submit the sitemap and let the crawler work, and only request the key pages by hand.

Expect the homepage in one to three days and other pages in one to two weeks. After you submit the sitemap it'll show "Success," but that only means Google read the file. It doesn't mean everything got indexed. For that, open the "Pages" report. It lists which pages are in, which are out, and why.

Google doesn't support IndexNow and has no other push channel. It does have an Indexing API, but that's only for job postings and livestream pages. Regular sites can't use it, no matter what a tutorial says.

Bing: Webmaster Tools

Second most important, and it covers several engines at once. Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, Ecosia and AOL all pull their results from Bing. Submit to Bing and you've submitted to all of them.

1. Open Bing Webmaster Tools. You can sign in with your Google account.
2. On sign-in it asks if you want to import from Search Console. Say yes, authorize it, and it copies over every site and sitemap you've already verified at Google. No second verification. This is the fastest route.
3. No Search Console? Add the site by hand. Same three verification options: DNS, HTML file, or meta tag.
4. "URL Submission" in the left menu lets you paste a batch of URLs at once.

Bing's per-URL quota is far more generous than Google's. A freshly verified site gets 10 a day. Once the site has some history there, that goes up to 10,000 a day. So on Bing, don't ration. Submit every page that matters.

Indexing is quick too, usually a day or two.

Yandex: Webmaster

The number one engine for Russian-language search, with more share than Google inside Russia. If you don't care about that market, this one's optional. If you do, it's fast.

1. Open Yandex Webmaster and create a Yandex account.
2. Add the site. Same three verification methods.
3. Submit the sitemap.
4. Under "Indexing" there's "Reindex pages" for individual URLs. There's a daily cap, somewhere around twenty or thirty.

Yandex supports IndexNow, so if you set that up (next section), you can skip the per-URL step here.

Baidu: Search Resource Platform

Only for sites with Chinese content. Otherwise skip this section.

1. Open Baidu Search Resource Platform and create a Baidu account. It wants a phone number. Most non-Chinese numbers receive the code. If yours doesn't, try a different carrier.
2. Add the site under "User Center." Verification is file, HTML tag, or CNAME.
3. Once verified, "Normal Inclusion" offers three ways in: API push, sitemap, or manual. Manual takes up to 20 URLs per batch. Sitemap has no limit.
4. If you see a "Fast Inclusion" option, don't count on it. It now requires linking a Baidu Mini Program. Regular websites don't get it.

Baidu crawls sites on overseas servers slowly. Some wait a month or two just for the homepage. Hosting in China with an ICP license speeds it up a lot, but that's a separate topic. Also, Baidu mostly indexes Chinese content. Submitting an English site does close to nothing.

IndexNow: one ping, several engines

This is a protocol Bing and Yandex launched in 2021. The idea is simple. You put a key file at your site root. Then every time you publish or update a page, you send one request to an endpoint, and every participating engine hears about it.

Participants today: Bing, Yandex, Naver (Korea), Seznam (Czech Republic) and Yep. Google doesn't take part. Neither does Baidu.

How to set it up depends on your stack:

• WordPress: install an IndexNow plugin, or turn it on inside Rank Math or Yoast.
• Sites behind Cloudflare: in the dashboard under "Caching" there's a toggle called "Crawler Hints." Turn it on and Cloudflare sends IndexNow pings for you. It's on the free plan.
• Custom-built sites: generate a key on the IndexNow site, drop it at your root, and add one HTTP request to your publish step. There's one endpoint and the docs fit on a page.

With this done, you don't need to hand-submit URLs to Bing or Yandex anymore. Publish, and they know.

The ones that don't take submissions

A few engines have nowhere to submit, so you can stop looking.

• DuckDuckGo has no submit form. Its results mostly come from Bing. Submit there.
• Brave Search runs its own index but doesn't accept submissions. It discovers new sites from user browsing.
• Yahoo, Ecosia, AOL are Bing results. Nothing to do separately.
• Naver has its own console (Search Advisor). Only bother if Korea is a target market. Otherwise IndexNow covers it.

How long indexing takes

Rough ranges from experience. It varies a lot from site to site, so treat these as orders of magnitude.

The simplest check is typing site:yourdomain.com into the search box. If results come up, you're in. That works on Google, Bing and Baidu.

If you're past these windows with nothing, open the console and read the reason it gives. Eight times out of ten it's a leftover noindex, a robots.txt block, or the server returning a 5xx. "Google just doesn't want it" is rare, and when it happens the console says so.

Indexed. Now what

Getting indexed is step one. A freshly indexed site with no backlinks shows up when someone searches your brand name and almost nowhere else. To show up for anything else, other already-indexed pages need to link to you.

So submitting to search engines usually goes together with submitting links. You submit the engines, then you go post your URL on a few sites that accept links. Those two steps together are a new site's full starting kit.

Places to post links come in two kinds.

Bookmarking and content aggregators. Post a link with a description. Most go live instantly. Whether the link is dofollow varies by site, and each detail page says which.

• Digg, DR 89. The old-timer, back online and taking submissions again.
• Scoop.it, DR 91. Make a topic page and curate your own pages into it.
• Diigo, DR 85. Social bookmarking. Post the link with tags.
• Pearltrees, DR 84. Same idea, with collections.
• Alltop, DR 73. Submit an RSS feed. Good if you have a blog.
• Blogarama, DR 64. Blog directory. Submit the feed and you're done.

Small search engines and link directories. These are the "search engines that still accept submissions." After the big ones pulled their forms, these are what's left where you can hand in a URL directly. Little traffic, but the links are real.

• ActiveSearchResults, DR 73. Free submission, dofollow.
• Viesearch, DR 72. Free submission, dofollow, a few days of review.
• Link Centre, DR 72. Free submission, dofollow.
• ExactSeek, DR 70. The free tier is nofollow. Fine for getting indexed, not for the link.

Each site's submit page and the things to watch for are on its detail page. Click through.

Once those are posted, Google's crawl rate usually shifts within three to seven days. You can see it under "Crawl stats" in Search Console.

Common mistakes

• Forgot to remove noindex. The number one cause, nothing else close. Check the source before launch.
• robots.txt says Disallow: /. Number two.
• Sitemap full of wrong URLs. Still the staging domain, or http and https mixed. Open the sitemap yourself before submitting it.
• Burning the per-URL quota on the whole site. Google gives you about ten a day. Submit the sitemap and let it crawl.
• Buying "submit to 1,000 search engines." 990 of them are dead. The rest are Bing mirrors or junk directories. Keep the money.
• Submitting and never looking again. Go back in a week or two and read the "Pages" report. Unindexed pages come with a reason.
• Expecting Baidu to be fast for an overseas site. Overseas server, no ICP license, a month with nothing is normal. Can't be rushed.
• Only doing Google. The Bing import takes two minutes and covers Yahoo and DuckDuckGo in the same go.

Side by side

FAQ

Does submitting improve rankings? No. Submitting only makes the engine aware of you. Rankings come from content and links.

Does Google have a submit URL page anymore? Not a public one. You submit a sitemap in Search Console and use "Request indexing" page by page.

What happens if I don't submit? A site with backlinks gets found eventually, usually within weeks. A site with zero backlinks might not get crawled at all. And without submitting, you have no console, so when indexing breaks you can't see why.

Should I use those "free website submission" tool sites? No. All they do is ping Bing plus a pile of dead engines on your behalf. Bing takes you two minutes on your own, and the rest do nothing.

Two weeks and still not indexed. Now what? Open the "Pages" report in Search Console and read the reason. Usually it's noindex, robots.txt, or very thin pages. If it's none of those, go post a few links and give it another week.

Do I have to do Baidu? Only for Chinese content. An English site won't get indexed there anyway, so skip it.

What's the difference between IndexNow and a sitemap? A sitemap sits there waiting to be read. IndexNow pushes the update out. Do both. They don't conflict.

Where the rest of the list lives

There are only a handful of search engines, and once they're submitted, they're submitted. The part that actually takes time is the link posting that comes after. Our directory has over a hundred sites that take free dofollow links, each tagged with link type, pricing, and our own notes from submitting.

Browse by category: content and bookmarking sites, directories. Want the strongest ones first? On the homepage, set the DR filter to 80+ and link type to dofollow.