Submitting your Website to SEARCH ENGINES - Should You Submit Again?

A few months will likely pass and at that point, it is usual that the average site's submitted pages will not be listed in the top100 let alone top 1000 rankings. Should you resubmit?

The answer to this question may lay in answering these question: Was the site's home page, or at least a few pages within the site even indexed?

Try searching for your site with some of the advanced search operators like:

Google--> allinurl:your-site-name.com - Yahoo!--> u:your-site-name.com

Using this search operator will show you how many pages actually currently are indexed in Google.

The actual search operators can vary based on the engine you are using, but most sites will offer an advanced search option or domain search option if you do not wish to bother with search operators. There are also engines like Yahoo! that have an exploration tool to simplify this process.

Did An Engine Index Your Page?

If you have a web analytics package or know how to review your site's log files, you can see whether a search engine robot has been visiting your site. Many search engines robots have obvious names like Google Bot, MSNbot, etc. or unique names like Slurp, rather than the simple IP address/browser name combinations that most of your human visitors will have.

If you are taking part in a search engine's paid advertising program, this can mean that your site will be indexed not only by a normal search spider but could also be analyzed by an advertising program spider. While advertising and submission services will not typically cause your site to gets an extra rankings boost, it can mean that your site will be indexed faster than letting the spider naturally crawl your site and updated more often than a non-advertiser.

I Can't Believe They Still Have THAT In The Index!

Some time has passed and you've likely had a few pages that have been indexed. From time to time, engines will return to your site to check for updates automatically. When others link to your site, the engines can also follow those links back to your site and re index your site as well.

However when looking at listings from your own site, you may find information that is out of date or different from the content that is currently on your page.

If your indexed content is out of date, first check your analytics package/log files as mentioned previously. Has the engine been by in the past few months? If so, it may simply take a bit longer for the engine to update its database and spread the updates throughout its various data centers.

If you do not have this type of option available to you, some engines will allow you to check their 'cache' directly from their search. Here is a search in MSN for the URL:
http://www.marketposition.com

Search, then click on the 'Cached page' option.

On the next page, at the top there is a note about when MSN had last examined this page. Since they have visited recently, I would not resubmit this even if the contents of the page had changed on say 4/7/06. The engine's robot should come back to visit the page in the future whether I resubmit or not.

If the date is quite old, such as 3-6+ months out of date, you may wish to resubmit if the page has updated information. If the content on the page is the same as the cached copy, there is no reason to resubmit and resubmission at that point will not help to improve your rankings.

How 'Search Engine friendly' is your site?

Some sites that rely heavily on flash, javascript, or other technologies are harder to interpret and index than those based on plain HTML/text. Search engines can choose to display listings from a directory like The Open Directory Project (DMOZ.org), if a search engine has a problem reading your page.

You can try to get your DMOZ listing updated however it might be better to fix your page so that it is more search friendly.

Many engines have multiple data centers. While the engines often update their data centers on a continuous basis, from time to time you could notice that a page seems to be partially indexed, such as a URL with no text description.

If you perform a unique text string search, you may find that the page's content has indeed been indexed, but perhaps the information has not yet been linked to your normal listing due to a canonical issue (i.e. your site was indexed twice, once under www.site.com and once under site.com where one or the other shows up with the text listing).

If you do find that one or the other is listed with text and the other is not, you may need to work on creating a 301 redirect rule for your site.

How do you test whether your pages have been indexed?

Easy! You search for a phrase that is likely to appear only on your page.

For example - let's say I want to find out whether my "...about-us" page has been indexed by Google.

What I do is I search for a phrase or a whole sentence from my "about-us" page that probably doesn't appear on other pages. So I search for: "Where can I add value today?"

If Google search shows me the URL of my "about-us" page, than I know that the page has indeed been indexed. If Google doesn't show my URL than my page has not been indexed.

If a number of your site pages have not been indexed, you might consider re-submitting not only these pages but also your sitemap in the format the search engines want your sitemap.