Let’s say you have developed an awesome website for your business or organization. You have added high quality content, revised the design and received good feedbacks. At this point, YOU are now ready to share your site to the rest of the world. You’re confident that all your pages and contents will show up straightaway in Google search right? Well, not quite. But we can definitely give you a few tips to get your website listed on Google. Read more to learn why and how to submit your website to Google.
How Google Discovers your Content
Google is huge! In fact it has a massive set of computers to crawl all the pages on the web.
This crawler is known as the Googlebot. It basically starts with a list of web page URLs that are created from previous crawls and then expands the pages with sitemap data that is within the condition of Google Search Console. In this process, the Googlebot will look for new websites, existing pages, and broken links.
So if you’ve added new pages inside your sitemap, it will be discovered by Google by crawling your content and possibly listing that page on the search result based upon the 200+ criteria evaluation.
As soon as the crawling process is complete, the results are added into Google’s index, therefore new sites or updated contents will be listed.
RELATED: 5 Ways to Rank Higher on Search Engines Using SEO
What information is Google looking for?
Google will look for information on your page such as the title tags, meta description, alt tags, and more. So having a page content that is dynamic might be difficult for the Googlebot to read. The Googlebot may not be able to read it and will crawl the default version instead.
Note: It is highly recommended to optimize the default version of your page content for a better search result.
As a result of Google crawling, there may not be a need of submitting your website since it will be discovered automatically. But there is a downside for this approach, and that’s being dependent on the timeframe set by Google to crawl and index your website content. This may not happen as fast as you would expect.
To check if a specific website has been indexed or not, you begin by typing “site:sitename.com” on google’s search box as displayed below:
Google will tell you that your search found no matching result if your site’s page content was not indexed.
If there’s no content found, what you should do next is create a sitemap that you can submit to Google.
How long does it take to index a content?
Casey Henry, who works at hubspot did a test run on how long would it take for Google & Yahoo to crawl and index your content. It showed him overwhelming results.
For published contents without manually submitting an updated sitemap would take Google 1375 minutes to crawl, while Yahoo takes 1773 minutes. Putting these numbers into our viewpoint, it would take roughly a full day just by crawling on your content.
Launching a new website or adding page content may perhaps be worth submitting an updated sitemap, since the average time for a bot to crawl the page would just take around 14 minutes, compared to 245 minutes for Yahoo. This simply shows that new pages can start generating organic traffic and increase your conversion rates.
Ways to submit your website
If you have a brand new website, you may want to verify it first with Google Search Console and submit here.
If you have an existing website and would want to launch new pages, then you must submit an updated sitemap instead. This will guarantee that it gets listed as quickly as possible.
All you need to do when submitting an updated sitemap is to log in to Google Search Console > Crawl tab > Sitemaps. As soon as you get there, you will be able to submit your updated sitemap for Google so it can start crawling as soon as possible.
You may be wondering if it’s necessary to submit an updated sitemap every time you publish a page. You could, it works best if you manually go through the submission process especially when working with important contents that are needed to be indexed right away. If you’re just doing minor updates or doing some corrections to your pages, then it’s fine to wait for Google to crawl the page and update its index.
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