Submitting Your Website to Search Engines

Updated: September 21, 2009

Search engines will automatically find your website if it is linked to by other websites, so if you are linked to by other websites you do not need to submit your site. If your website is not linked to by any other websites, you can easily submit your website. While there are websites and services that claim to submit your website to many search engines, these may cause you problems with the search engines and according to Nielsen Online, in August 2009, 98.7 percent of U.S. searches came from the top ten search engines, 96.1 percent came from the top five search engines, 91.3 percent came from the top three search engines, and 64.6 percent came from Google Search. So you can quickly and easily submit your website to the few search engines that could actually bring traffic to your website. Below are directions for submitting your website to the top ten search engines. Remember that you only need submit your main page; the search engine will find the rest. After submitting it may take a while for the search engines to crawl and list your website.

Google Search

Submit at http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl.

Yahoo! Search

Submit at https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit (free registration is required).

Bing Search

Submit at http://www.bing.com/docs/submit.aspx.

AOL Search

AOL Search is powered Google Search, so a submission to Google Search will cover it.

Ask.com Search

Ask.com Search does not provide a web address to submit your site. They do support submitting a sitemap file at. If you already have a sitemap file you submit it with this URL: http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml (replace example.com with your website address. If you do not already have a sitemap, a simple sitemap can be made by coping the code below into a file called sitemap.xml, replacing example.com with your website address.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

  <urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  <url>
  <loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>
  </url> 
  </urlset>

My Web Search

My Web Search uses Ask.com Search, Google Search, or Yahoo! Search results; so a submission to those three will cover it.

Comcast Search

Comcast Search is powered Google Search, so a submission to Google Search will cover it.

Yellow Pages Search

Yellow Pages is a business search engine that does not list websites.

NexTag Search

NexTag is a shopping search engine that does not list websites.

Local.com Search