Search Engine Submission
July 7, 2008 by Shop Network
There are some who advocate that search engine submission is not necessary. These people state that search engines find websites naturally through links on other websites, blog comments, forum signatures, and link directories. However, I’m sure that the search engines have created their link submission page for a reason — they want to be informed of new sites. Multiple redundant submissions to the same search engine is strongly discouraged.
Submit your site to Google
Submit your blog to Google Blog Search
Submit your site to Yahoo!
Submit your site to MSN
In addition, the search engines like sitemaps. Wordpress has a nice plugin that generates a Google compliant sitemap. If you’re not using a blog, then you can use a paid ($19.99) .PHP script to generate a sitemap consisting of an unlimited number of links. The free version of this same script limits the size of a sitemap to 500 links.
Getting the word out about your sitemap
Once the sitemap is generated, it is highly recommended to tell the search engines about its presence. This can be done automatically! In order to do this, amend the robots.txt file to point to the sitemap’s location. As an example, I have included some information from this site’s robots.txt file.
User-agent: * Crawl-delay: 20 Sitemap: http://www.shop-network.org/sitemap-1.xml.gz Sitemap: http://www.shop-network.org/sitemap-2.xml.gz
You’ll notice that I’ve bolded a couple of search engine instructions. Since each reputable search engine that visits a site complies with the robots.txt standard, you can be assured that including sitemap information in the robots.txt file will get your URLs noticed. You’ll also notice that I have two sitemaps, and that I have Gzipped each of them. This is because Google limits the number of URLs in an individual sitemap to 50,000. In addition, Google limits the size of the sitemaps it accepts to 10MB in size. For sites with many urls, compressing the sitemap saves bandwidth.
To add another layer of search engine visibility, tell Google about your sitemap through the Google Webmaster Interface and tell Yahoo! about your sitemap though the Yahoo! Site Explorer.
Read our blog post about RSS Feed Submission.
Microsoft has launched their own MSN Webmaster Center. Here, you can submit your sitemap to MSN in much the same manner that you would submit it to Google’s Webmaster Interface. To reinforce what I was suggesting above, adding the location of the sitemap(s) to the robots.txt file will allow other search engines to index your site quicker.