Is it OK to Submit Your Site to Search Engines?

I am seeing more and more website control panels and dashboards with this automatic SUBMIT TO GOOGLE button after page additions or even just in the content area itself. I don't know why website providers feel the need to give this option to their clients unless they just don't know any better themselves.

So what's the answer?

Should you constantly submit your site to search engines and directories? What about individual pages? Major site changes?

Here's the scoop on site submissions.

While the best way to be found is simply that - to be found by other sites - there are a few reasons to submit your site to search engines. 

First of all, find out if your site and pages are indexed at all. Do this by going to the Google search box and typing in index:http://www.yourwebisite.com (meaning your actual website or url for a particular page). If the results do not show that page or website, your site is not getting indexed. This may be because it's new or you have never linked to it. In this case, go ahead and submit your site to search engines. There is a variety of ways to do this: Submit Express is a good place to start and they will submit your site to Google along with several others across the world. You will need to manually submit to Yahoo and Bing here.  (You will need a Yahoo account to submit to Yahoo).

If your site IS indexed there is really no need to continue to submit your site. As long as you are linking to the homepage (like from your ActiveRain blog) and to sub pages from your blogs, social media and other sites, your site will be found and indexed.

Submitting your site too often MAY result in penalties and black listing.

What about a major change to the site?

This is another good reason to re-submit a site. My friend Djana Morris just moved her whole site over to a new site with a new domain, style and design. This would be the perfect time to submit the site. She went from a Style Agent site to a Reel Geeks site with a new domain for Where to Live in Washington DC. Submitting this major change will notify the search engines and they will now start pointing the information to the new site rather than the old. Major changes does not include a page addition, meta tag changes or minor content changes.

Is it OK to submit your site every few months?

This is a controversial subject among SEO professionals. Some say yes, others say never. What do I say? If I have been working with a site for over a year and they still can't get their pages ranked very high, I will consider re-submitting them with a comment to that fact. At this point it shouldn't harm the site since it's not a submission every week or even every month. Am I cautious about it? Absolutely.

Submitting your site to directories such as http://www.dmoz.org and such should be done only once. You may or may not get accepted but over submitting can lead to site banning.

The best way to be found is to get some links pointing to your site from reputable, high quality sites. This can include ActiveRain, blog comments from already indexed WordPress sites and social media.

Remember to put links to your site in your content, internal links from page to page in the site itself and link to your site from Facebook, Twitter, discussions on Linkedin and others.

Here are a couple links for some great clients of mine!

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