Listing in Search Engines
It seems you are just starting out with SEO: a manual submission to search engines has not been necessary for a long time, even though it is still technically possible. What truly matters are links pointing to your website—this ensures that it will automatically be discovered by Google and Bing. However, this only works if the links come from a well-linked website that already appears in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
Search engines deploy an army of web crawlers—small programs that constantly visit all accessible pages on the internet. These crawlers thoroughly examine the content of websites and follow links to discover new pages, analyze them, and continue the process.
Manual Submission to Search Engines Is Now Redundant—Crawlers Do the Work
All crawled data is meticulously stored and ultimately contributes to the search engine results, such as Google Search. Only pages that have been crawled can appear in these results. Additionally, only pages linked directly from other sites typically have a chance to achieve a prominent position—unless the domain is exceptionally strong, with long-established trust and a robust backlink profile.
What you should do, however, is register your website in Google’s Search Console and Bing’s Webmaster Tools. These platforms help search engines manage your site more effectively. Experts can even use these tools to speed up the indexing of specific subpages or to prevent certain pages from being indexed.
In summary, manual submissions to search engines are unnecessary, and anyone still offering this service likely lacks a solid understanding of modern SEO practices.
A Historical Perspective: Submitting to Search Engines
In the past, submitting websites to search engines was a common practice to ensure they were indexed and appeared in search results. In the early days of the internet, when there were fewer websites, search engines could potentially crawl and index all available pages without needing manual submissions.
As the number of websites grew exponentially, it became increasingly challenging for search engines to find all pages automatically. Submitting a website or individual page was a way to guarantee its presence in search results. Manual submissions could also improve SEO by providing search engines with additional information about the site. For example, users could submit keywords and descriptions that accurately described the site’s content, helping search engines deliver more relevant search results.
Today, however, search engines have become highly sophisticated. They can automatically discover and index most websites, rendering manual submission largely unnecessary.