How to submit your website to Google Search Console
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If you want your site to be listed in the top search results, the best time to submit your website to Google is now! For starters, you should sign up for a Google Search Console account to help the search engine find and better understand your content. Thus, you must put effort into getting your site properly indexed by Google.
This guide will show you how to add your site to Google Search Console in 2023. Keep reading to learn what is the Search Console and how Google discovers and indexes your content.
With the Search Console, you can take advantage of tools that enable you to:
- Check and confirm whether Google can parse and crawl your site.
- Get reports on duplicate content, indexing issues, and request re-indexing of pages.
- Monitor your site’s Google Search traffic data to devise strategies for increasing it.
- Get notified about security issues or penalties on your site.
- See who is linking to your site’s content.
- Receive reports on any broken links and 404 errors.
- Troubleshoot mobile and desktop usability, website core web vitals, or other search issues.
How Google finds and index your site?
Google Search works in four main stages; however, not all pages pass through them successfully.
The four Google Search stages are:
- Discover
- Crawl
- Indexing
- Serving Search Results
Discover
The first stage of Google Search is learning that your website exists. Google constantly searches for new pages on the web and adds them to its known pages list. This is called the “URL discovery” process. Google may know a page because it has already visited it or discover a new page by following a link from a known page.
Google can also discover other pages thanks to the list of pages (sitemap) you may provide when you submit a website to Google.
Crawl
Google crawls billions of pages thanks to a large set of powerful machines. Once the page has been discovered, Google may visit (“crawl”) it to determine what’s on it. That process is called crawling, and a web crawler called Googlebot (bot/robot/spider) executes it.
The spider uses a sophisticated algorithm to work out which sites to crawl, how often, and how many pages to fetch from a site. Still, Googlebot is programmed not to crawl a site at an excessive rate (“Crawl rate”) to prevent overloading the hosting server.
Furthermore, a file called “robots.txt” defines what the bot can crawl and what not. Before crawling, Googlebot parses a site’s robots.txt to determine which parts it is allowed to crawl.
Index
After Googlebot crawls a page, it tries to determine what it is about. This stage is called indexing, which involves processing the page’s content, meta tags, images, videos, etc.
Additionally, it matches pages against hundreds of criteria to classify them accurately. During this stage, Google also concludes if the page contains duplicate content; if it doesn’t, it stores it in the index. That being said, you should note that not every page Googlebot processes will be indexed.
The indexing process ensures any new websites or updated content will be fed into Google’s index and listed accordingly.
Serving search results
When a user makes a search query, Google scans the index for the most relevant and high-quality results to serve. Many factors define the relevance of a page, such as a user’s location, language, and device.
Based on these factors, Google serves the best possible results found in the search index.
How to submit your website to Google?
Google will eventually discover and index your pages even if you don’t register your site with Google Search Console. However, making that effort pays off as the Search Console provides excellent tools and features to help you get ahead in the ranking.
In this section, we will dive into the practical part of how to put a website on Google.
Follow the guide below to list your website in Google and help it understand your content better. Remember that if Google has a thorough comprehension of your site, chances are that it’ll be shown in the most relevant search results.
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Create your account at Google Search Console
To submit your website to Google, you must sign up for a Google Search Console account. This is a free service that you can use to track and maintain your site’s presence in Google’s search results.
You can use your existing Gmail account to access Google Search Console or create a new one. To initiate the signup process, click on the “Start now” button at the bottom of the page.
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Google Search Console Domain verification methods
After you’ve started the process, you’ll need to verify the ownership of your website with Google. To do that, add your domain name to the following page, and Google will provide you with a TXT record for domain verification.
Once you type your domain and click “Continue,” the Search Console will generate a TXT record for your domain.
Copy the TXT record value, and add it to your domain’s DNS configuration. Usually, you can manage your domain’s DNS zone from your web hosting account or from your Domain name provider.
If you are a SiteGround client and your domain name points to our Name servers, you can easily add the TXT record to your DNS Zone Editor in the respective Site Tools for your domain.
When in there, select the TXT tab and paste the TXT record provided by Google in the Value field, then click Create.
After the TXT record has been created, you’ll need to allow it some time to become available worldwide. Then you can get back to the Google Search Console verification process and click the Verify button.
If the record has propagated, Google will verify your domain ownership, showing you a success message.
In case the authentication fails, you’ll see a message informing you to give it more time for propagation.
If, in a few hours, Google is still unable to verify your ownership, you can try another verification method.
Depending on your preference, you can choose between authenticating your domain name via HTML file, HTML tag, Google Analytics, or Google Tag Manager.
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Find your sitemap or generate one
After Google has confirmed your ownership of the website, you should check whether you already have a sitemap or not.
A sitemap is like a roadmap of your website, helping search engines to index it accurately. It includes the URLs of your pages, videos, images, files, and information about their relations. It may also hold additional metadata about the frequency of content updates and indexing priority.
There are two main types of sitemaps – HTML and XML. When it comes to Search Engine Optimization, the XML sitemap is the preferred option for crawling and indexing.
In case you’ve previously generated a sitemap, you should be able to find it at an URL similar to the following:
https://yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xmlHow to generate an XML sitemap
Technically, you can create a sitemap manually, although that task can be pretty time-consuming and arduous. Therefore, we recommend using an automated method to generate your sitemap.
- Use the Yoast plugin for WordPress
If you are a WordPress user, you can take advantage of plugins like Yoast SEO to generate an XML Sitemap for your site. To do that, install the plugin from your WordPress Dashboard and navigate to Yoast SEO > General in the left sidebar. Under the Features tab, scroll down to enable XML Sitemaps.
When the sitemaps feature is On, you can hit the question mark next to XML Sitemaps and click on See XML Sitemap.
As a best practice, Yoast SEO creates multiple sitemaps for each part of your site – posts, pages, products, and categories. Then it combines all of these sitemaps into one single file called sitemap_index.xml.
This way, it’ll be much easier for Google to gain knowledge of your website’s content to index it accurately. Moreover, even if your website expands, the sitemaps will still load quickly and be at a manageable size.
Thus, the contextual button brings you to the index sitemap with an URL similar to “https://yourwebsite.com/sitemap_index.xml.”
Now that you have your XML Sitemap at hand, you can proceed to submit your site for Google indexing. Keep reading to learn how to do that manually or automatically using the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress.
- Use a Sitemap Generator for non-WordPress sites
There are various tools to automatically generate an XML sitemap for your website. An example of such a web-based tool is the XML-Sitemap generator which crawls your site and creates a sitemap in seconds. Simply type your website’s URL and click the Start button to start the generation. Once ready, the tool will provide you with an option to download your sitemap.xml file. Then, you must upload that file to your site’s root directory using your hosting’s File Manager. When the file is uploaded, you can access it using an URL like “https://yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml.”
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Submit your sitemap to Google
After getting your sitemap URL, you should add it to Google for crawling. To do that, open your Search Console and navigate to the Sitemaps section under Indexing from the left sidebar.
When in there, type the URL of your XML sitemap and hit Submit to prompt Google to start crawling your site.
From here on, Google will crawl and eventually index your site based on the information from your XML Sitemap at its own pace. You need to allow it some time to crawl your site and include it in the index.
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Integrate Google Search Console with WordPress
If you’ve generated your sitemap using Yoast SEO for WordPress, you can benefit from the plugin’s integration with Google Search Console. In that manner, Yoast will update Google automatically every time a new sitemap is available.
To do that, go to your WordPress Dashboard and navigate to Yoast SEO > General section. Under the Webmaster tools tab, click on the Google Search Console link under the Google Verification code field.
This link will forward you to the Google Search Console verification page, where you can select the HTML tag method to authenticate your site. Google will provide you with a meta tag, from which you need to copy just the alphanumeric code string.
Then, paste the code in the appropriate field under the Webmaster tools tab in Yoast SEO > General, and hit Save changes.
After the code is saved, go back to the Google Search Console verification tab and click the Verify button to complete the process. If all is in order, Google will show you a success message that your site is now verified.
Congrats! Now Google Search Console is integrated with your WordPress website, thanks to Yoast SEO.
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Submit URLs to Google – options
In case Google already has your sitemap, but you are launching new pages, you can prompt Google to index them. You can do that by submitting URLs directly to your Google Search Console Account or by pinging Google.
Submit an URL by pinging Google
To submit an URL for indexing, you can ping Google using the web address “https://google.com/ping?sitemap=.” To specify the exact URL you need to be crawled, type it right after “sitemap=” and load it in the browser.
For example, if you wish Google to index your new product category page https://yourwebsite.com/women-boots/, type that after “sitemap=.” Here is what that looks like:
https://google.com/ping?sitemap=https://yourwebsite.com/women-boots/Note that you’ll have to replace “yourwebsite.com” with your actual domain name. When you load the ping URL in your browser, Google will display a confirmation message, as in the screenshot below.
Use the Google URL Inspection Tool
Alternatively, you may submit a new URL to Google through your Google Search Console dashboard. To do that, log into your account and type the URL you want to add to the index in the URL Inspection field.
Google will check whether the URL is already indexed and if not, it’ll give you the option to Request Indexing.
In case there is an issue with the indexing of a particular URL, you can also use the tool to Test Live URL. This will determine whether there is any issue with the page and give you some insights into what may be wrong.
Common Google Search Console Questions and Troubleshooting
Naturally, there are plenty of questions that can come up while you’re trying to make your website show up on Google. In this section, we’re going to answer the most common questions about registering sites with Google, so read on.
How long does it take for Google to index my site?
Indexing depends entirely on Googlebot’s algorithm – you can’t force it to expedite listing your site on Google. In general, it may take up to a few weeks for your site to show up, depending on the size of the global crawl queue.
Still, following the steps described above, you can facilitate Google in finding and better comprehending your content.
How to check if Google has indexed my site?
In case you aren’t sure whether Google has already indexed your site, you can check that by doing a simple search. Open your preferred browser and load google.com, then type “site:yourwebsite.com” in the search field.
If your site is already indexed, Google will show it listed in the search results, as in the screenshot below.
However, if your site is not yet indexed, Google will display a message: “Your search did not match any documents.”
Why is my site not showing up on Google?
If your site is not showing in Google’s search results, you should troubleshoot and address the issue promptly. There may be many reasons why Google might not have indexed your site, and below we’ll outline the most common ones.
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Ensure your site is working correctly
Google may be failing to crawl your site due to accessibility issues. If your site isn’t reachable and there is a permanent error on it, Google won’t be able to crawl it. Thus, you should ensure your site is up and running to help Google index it.
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Make sure Googlebot isn’t blocked
Another reason for Google’s failure to crawl your site might be that Googlebot is blocked in your robots.txt. As the purpose of this file is to instruct search engines on which pages to crawl, you should check if it’s adequately scripted.
For example, if your robots.txt contains the following directive, Google wouldn’t be allowed to crawl your site.
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /To correct this, simply remove the forward slash after “Disallow,” and Google will be able to crawl your site.
User-agent: *
Disallow:You can check whether your robots.txt file blocks Googlebot from crawling with Google’s robots.txt Tester.
- Check for noindex tags
The nofollow and noindex meta tags signal Google what it can’t crawl or follow. The noindex tag tells Google that a particular page shouldn’t be indexed. This tag takes effect and is considered by Google only if there isn’t a disallow directive placed in the robots.txt.
To check whether there are noindex tags on your site preventing Google from indexing it, you can use the Google Search Console. When in there, navigate to Indexing > Pages > Excluded by “noindex” tag, and you will see a list of such pages if present.
- Check for JavaScript issues on your page
Googlebot renders the JavaScript-powered content on your website, interpreting it in raw HTML code. This means that Google “sees” your website a bit differently than how it looks in your browser.
Google can only index content that it can render. Unfortunately, poorly written code or a plugin may be blocking Google’s JavaScript rendering.
To test whether the JavaScript on your site renders correctly, you can use the URL Inspection Tool within Google Search Console.
Conclusion
To sum up, you must make your site easy to find and index for Google if you’re after higher rankings. You’ve learned how to submit your site for Google indexing and what to troubleshoot if your site is not showing up in the results. Now you can begin the journey of optimizing your site for search engines with confidence.