How often to submit your site to the search engines?
On two occasions this week I’ve had people ask me how often you should submit a site to the search engines, and what do we/Zarr charge for doing so.
If I was ruthless, I could lie and take the money…
However, I’m not. The answer is that you probably never need to submit a site to Google, Yahoo or MSN as if you are linked to from any site, then you’ll be picked up automatically. If you haven’t got anyone linking to you, you could always try Google Site Submission.
Just a side note in that if you submit a site using the Google Site Submission tool today, you may not appear in the Google results (even if you do a site:domain.com type syntax) for several weeks.
Just to expand on that, say if your new site A was linked to from site B. The search engine robots/crawlers getting content from site B would find the new URL to your site A - and add it to the queue of what needs to be crawled.
The when a robot requests a URL to crawl and your site appears, off it goes to pickup your site’s content, indexes the content, finds all the links on the page and adds those to the list to crawl……… and so on.
In hours, days, weeks or months later when it next decides to visit URLs on your site, it will again index the content, find new URLs etc. You can’t really influence the frequency of visits but the robots will return!
Adding new content to the site on a regular basis will encourage them to come back sooner rather than later. To give an idea of how many robots you can expect - one of my person sites thats got about 600 pages gets about 1200 robot visits a day on a normal day.
So answering the question I’ve been asked twice this week: “how often you should submit a site to the search engines, and what do we/Zarr charge for doing so.”
You shouldn’t as it will happen naturally after you first get indexed… But be sure to add regular content and the robots will come back regulary.
