Search Engine Registration
When you register a website with a search engine, you provide the information concerning it to the search engine in order to get it included in the index. The search engine will usually provide a form you fill in for this purpose. Registration can be done manually or automatically. The Google search engine does not require an explicit registration because the it is able to identify new websites on its own through its algorithms.
What is search engine registration?
Search engines were previously not able to recognize new websites, so it was explicitly necessary to register them with the search engines. Search engines offered special registration forms for this purpose. After an initial review of the website, it got included in the search engine index. To this day, there are many internet services that automate search engine registration applications. In today’s world, search engine registration is no longer a big factor, because the Google search engine dominates the market and registering with other search engines gives no added value.
Registration with Google
Google was the first search engine with a link-based algorithm that was able to identify web pages without prior registration and incorporate them into its index. But Google still provides the option to register a URL or a domain in the search console. Despite the registration, Google does not guarantee that the submitted website URL will be included in the Google index.
The time it takes to get indexed can vary greatly. Even after manual registration, several weeks or even months may pass before indexing is complete. Partially, however, this process may take only a few hours or days. How long it takes to be indexed and how a website gets indexed depends on several factors:
- Incoming external links from other websites
- Existing domain or new project
- Viewing the site in the Google index
- Valuation of the website (such as PageRank)
Search engine registration in the Google Search Console
You can register your website in the Google Search Console in order to assist Google to find and index your website sooner. This requires authentication as an owner. In the “Crawling” > “Fetch as Google” section, individual URLs can first be retrieved and then submitted to the index. Up to 500 individual URLs or up to ten URLs including all linked pages, can be submitted per week this way. However, there is no guarantee that your site will be indexed with this approach. Google reserves its rights in this respect.
Sitemaps for search engine registration
Particularly for websites which are very extensive and for which there are therefore only few chances to be fully indexed, the submission of a sitemap is particularly important. The operator first selects all the subpages which are particularly important and which should be indexed with priority. These need to be recorded on the sitemap. The sitemap is linked directly to the start page of the website so that Googlebot is given the opportunity to directly find and index the most important pages. A search engine registration in the Google Search Console provides another advantage here. The site operator can submit their sitemap.XML file and therefore direct Google to the most important pages to be indexed right away.
Risks of automated search engine registration
For a long time, automated registration services were used to register websites with as many search engines as possible. Apart from the fact that most other search engines besides Google, Bing and Yahoo are currently not relevant because of their small market share, such registration services can even have a negative effect nowadays.
Automated registration often includes not only registration for just search engines, but also web catalogs or link lists. Such services can be used for link building. However, these are unnatural links that violate Google Webmaster Guidelines. Links from web catalogs and link lists have now largely been devalued. Google is increasingly penalizing websites with an unnatural link profile.
Conclusion
Search engine registrations are no longer necessary due to advanced search engine algorithms. Because of its domination on the market it is most important to be included in the Google index. Since Google will find the website itself, no special search engine registration is required.