You have worked hard, struggled with every in and out of your new website. But, its finally done and you are ready to publish it. You are elated and hopeful that though Google millions of people will be able to read everything you put out. You only need to push publish and submit the website to Google. It is as easy as that right? Truth be told, no.
Google has its own processes and procedures that need to happen before it adds your website to its search results
Crawl and Index
As the subtitle says, the two main processes that Google commits to your new site are called ”crawl” and “index”. Both of them could take days, but depending on your content it could also take a lot longer. The longest possible waiting time is a month and a half. Waiting that long could be detrimental to your business. Luckily you can do it manually. We will get to that later, first, let us look into the “crawl” and “index”.
Google’s Spider
Called the Googlebot, the crawler is a set of computers that crawls millions and millions of web sites online. Every time it is activated, this “spider” will start by accessing a list of previous websites that it has “crawled together” during a previous search. Those sites are later edited and orders by the Google Search Console. During the new crawl, “Google’s Spider” will add new sites, report if it finds any broken links. It will also notice and update any changes on sites that it has crawled before.
There are a lot of criteria that Google uses to add a new website to its search results. According to some, the number of criteria is higher than two hundred. If your website passes those criteria, the spider will crawl it together with the rest and it will be added to the search results.
On average, Google crawls for content during an entire day. Or in other words, if you created a really great site, you might start generating traffic in just over a day.
Google’s Index
After the “Spider” does its job, the results of its labors are added to Google Index. The index will list every new site or websites that have undergone changes. Google uses information on your website to make its judgment during the processing phase. Some of the most important parts of information that it looks at are meta descriptions, alt tags, as well as title tags. Depending on the complexity of the site, the “Spider” might struggle. If your website is overloading the “Spider” the spider will just look at the default version of your website. In other words, it will be very advisable for you to your default website version as search engine optimized as possible.
Checking if your site has been added
Depending on the job you do on your default website, you might never even need to add your website to Google. The Spider and the Index will do that for you. But, as we said earlier, that could take a long time. But waiting is not the only thing that you can do during that period. In the case that you are of an impatient nature, you can always check if Google added your site by searching for it on google. All you need to do is to type site: followed by the address of your website. In other words, just type site:Mywebsite.com and you will know if the adding process is over or not. That will tell you if submit a website to Google worked or not.
There are three scenarios that can occur after said search:
- Your website has appeared, which means Google has added it to its search results.
- Your website might be added, but the contents are not. This means that your search did not match any real results. In this case, you might need to create a sitemap to your website.
- Your website is not found. Google is still busy with crawling and indexing and you will need to be more patient. If you lack patience, you can just go ahead and try to add the site yourself.
Manually Submitting your Site to Google
To add something yourself, first, you need to be registered with Google Search Controle. If you have a new site or a site that has been heavily updated you will need to create or update that site’s sitemap. The other option is to use Fetch as Google.
If you are adding a new site, verify it first through Google Search Controle. After that just follow google’s instructions and select an option named “submit a sitemap”. One of the easier ways to submit a website to Google.
In the case that you are launching new pages on an existing site, you need to add the new URLs and ask Google to crawl those sites again. Everyone was able to do that in the past, but now, due to security concerns, only the owner of the website can request a re-crawl.
Fetch as Google
Using this tool you will be able to look at the website in the same fashion Google does. If you are indeed the owner of the site, you can just use Fetch as Google to index your site or particular URLs once again.
To do this you just need to log into Google Search Console, find and select what you need. Once you have found your site, find Crawl then Fetch as Google on the sidebar menu Google offers. After that, you will notice new bars. One where you can paste or type down the address of the pages you want to index. And bars to Fetch and ReIndex.
After you Fetch the site, Google will make a judgment if the Fetched sites are worth indexing again. If you see Complete next to your sites, you can request indexing.
As we have told you above, the indexing process can take time. So we would advise you to look at Fetch as Google every now and then. If it says partial next to the site, it means you still have to wait. If you retool your website often, you might need to follow the previous steps often.