We all know by now that you don’t need to actually submit your URL to Google or “submit URL to Google”. Google’s crawlers typically are so good about crawling the web that you don’t need to tell them about a new URL or a new page. And, it’s been this way for years now. I’ve written about it time and time again. You don’t need to submit your website to the search engines, it’s actually free, and you certainly do NOT need to pay to submit your website.
But nonetheless, Google does have a form that you can use to submit URL to Google:
All you have to do is search Google for “submit url to Google” and you’ll see the form. But, you may want to actually see if your site or your page (or your URL) is already indexed in Google. If it’s not, then see Google’s own help topic on the subject.
There is an “I’m not a robot” recaptcha there just to slow bots down. Or just to stop badly programmed bots from submitting their URLs.
What I’m interested in testing, though, is whether or not this acts differently than using Google’s Fetch and Render tool to essentially do the same thing, which is to cause Google to crawl a URL. I’m going to use this “new” tool for this post and see how it goes. I will update this post below if I don’t get a quick index of this post.
Most don’t probably need an explanation, but when you use that form in Google’s search results to submit a URL to Google, they explain that the page may not rank high in the search results right away:
“Page may not immediately rank high in Search results, but can improve over time. Monitor your site’s search traffic in Search Console.”
Update: After I posted this post, I used the tool and within seconds the post is now indexed in Google. However, notice that even though I wrote this about 3 minutes ago, Google still thinks I posted it 5 hours ago:
