Search engines rely on an automatic system in order to find and index the sites they show in their search result pages. They do so with the help of computer programs called web crawlers/spiders. Such a system has been proven effective over the time it has been implemented, however, it is not perfect. Without links directing the bots to your site, they may have difficulty finding it. That is why we suggest manual submission of your sites to all the major search engines. Once submitted, it may take two to four weeks for the site to be indexed.
In certain cases, manual submission of the site is recommended and they are:
- Launching a brand new site: when a new site is launched, it may take days, maybe weeks for the crawlers to find it. Submitting the site manually might lead to your site being crawled sooner. It is important to note that it may not always be the case.
- Notably updating a page: When a page’s content has been changed substantially, submitting it to the search engine could make the page be re-indexed sooner. It is generally better than waiting for the next scheduled visit from the crawlers, which could take up to six weeks.
- Incomplete indexing: there are some pages on your site that for some reason were not indexed. You can manually submit these pages.
If any of them are applicable, then a sitemap must be submitted to the search engines. In a previous blog, we provided guidelines on how to submit a sitemap to Google. Now, we are going to show you how to submit a site to Yahoo.
Although Yahoo is the second largest search engine worldwide, they have recently partnered with Microsoft’s Bing search engine. Yahoo! search is now powered by Bing and thus, in order to get your site indexed, you will need to submit a sitemap to Bing Webmaster Tools. Once that is done, the site will be indexed in both Bing and Yahoo! Search engines.
A sitemap is a list of all pages that belong to a domain. These could be generated using plugins and sitemap generators or written manually. Once you have a sitemap ready, you will need to submit it via Bing’s submission tool.
Here's how to do just that:
First, you will need to create a Bing Webmaster account and connect your website to it. Once complete, sign into Bing Webmaster Tools and proceed to Configure My Site. Under the Submit URLs, you can enter your site's URLs for indexing (one URL per line). Keep in mind that there is a limit on how many you can submit a day and it is determined by the site verified age in Bing Webmaster Tool. Currently, the criteria are:
- Site verified age is 1 day or more = 10 URLs per day
- Site verified age is 7 days or more = 250 URLs per day
- Site verified age is 30 days or more = 1000 URLs per day
- Site verified age is 180 days or more = 10000 URLs per day
This feature is currently only available for root domains and will now accept submission of subdomains.
