Do You Need to Submit Your Website to Google for It to Appear in Search Results?

How Does Google Work?

“When you do a Google search, you aren’t actually searching the web. You’re searching Google’s index of the web, or at least as much of it as we can find.

We do this with software programs called spiders. Spiders start by fetching a few web pages, then they follow the links on those pages and fetch the pages they point to; and follow all the links on those pages, and fetch the pages they link to, and so on, until we’ve indexed a pretty big chunk of the web; many billions of pages stored on thousands of machines.”

While a brand new site can submit its URL to Google directly, a search engine like Google can still index your site without you submitting it.”

– Matt Cutts in Lesson 1.3 of How Search Works. Watch the video here.

The idea that you need to submit your website to Google in order to appear in search results (or rank) is nonsense.

Even if you do submit your site to Google, a submission does not guarantee anything. Crawlers will find your site and index it in due time, so don’t worry about this idea of needing to “tell” Google about your site.

If you’d like to hear more from Matt Cutts about “How Google Works,” click here.