Submitting your website(4)

Submitting your website to Google

If it took any significant time to submit your URL to Google, we would say, “don’t bother.” Google only ranks sites that it finds from following links on the Internet with its spider, Googlebot. Even though Google may have your site in its database from your submission, your site will have no ranking until some other included site links to it…and Google’s spider finds that link. The only advantage of submitting your site to Google before it is found by the spider is that your site will show up if someone types in the URL or the exact description of your site in a Google search. Since it takes very little time to search engine submitting, you should do so for that purpose. Although it may be rare that people will type in your URL or an exact match of your description, they are the very ones you do not want to miss while you are waiting for your site to be spidered.

thesnapsoft.com

To submit your site to Google, go to http://www.google.com and click the Advanced Search link. At the top right of the resulting page, click All About Google, then the Submitting Your Site link on the resulting page. At the time of this writing, you can also simply go straight to http://google.com/addurl.html. Enter your site’s complete URL (that is, include the “http://” in your Website address) in the appropriate field and type a short description of your site for the comment. Check your typing and spelling and then click the Add URL button below.

Included in Google

If other sites link to your Website, Google will find it pretty quickly. Google currently spiders the entire Web at least once a month. Rather than waiting for the spider to find you, however, the best way to ensure inclusion in Google (as well as Netscape, AOL, AllTheWeb, Alta Vista, HotBot, Lycos, and Northern Light) is to submit your site to the Open Directory Project. Google, as well as the other search engines listed above, include data from Netscape’s Open Directory Project, which uses human indexing like Yahoo! does. Thus, Google uses its own software-driven spidering technology and supplements it with the dmoz’s human indexing. Since you cannot manipulate the results of the spider technology (other than to create a high-quality popular site), your submitting efforts are best placed with dmoz. A good ranking with dmoz can ensure your inclusion in several major search engines. Submitting to the Open Directory Project will be the subject of our next lesson.

Conclusion
If you have a Website with lots of links to it from popular Websites, Google will find it and give you a good ranking without any effort on your part. If you have a new site that does not yet have a lot of links to it, you should submit your sites to Google, but you should focus your submitting efforts on the Open Directory Project (dmoz). A good ranking by dmoz will earn you a good position in Google as well as other major search engines. You should also consider placing an ad with Google if your budget allows.