Simple Link Submissions to Google and Bing

By Peter Kent from Search Engine Optimization For Dummies, 5th Edition

The top two search engines — Google and Bing — provide a very simple way for you to tell them where your site is. Submit your site for free on these pages:

Google
Bing (scroll to the bottom of this page)

Google actually provides a similar method, from within the Google Webmaster account. The Webmaster account has a Fetch as Googlebot tool (under the Diagnostics menu). You can use this tool to have Google pull a page and show you the code it has crawled.

You can then click the Submit to Index link to submit that page to the Google index. Still, it doesn’t guarantee that Google will index the page you submit, though it might be worth trying if you have some particular pages on your site that you can’t seem to get indexed.

How about Ask.com? It offers no way to submit your website. It relies on its searchbots to find pages through links.

Using these submission pages is unnecessary and may not even work. Neither Google nor Bing guarantees that submitting your site will get it listed.

Don’t bother submitting URLs to search engines using these simple URL submission pages. But you should be aware of them because these submissions are one of the biggest scams in the history of SEO (a business that is rife with scams).

Hundreds of submission services convinced many thousands of website owners to pay to have their sites submitted to the search engines, often repeatedly. It was a totally pointless waste of money.

You don’t need to use basic URL submission. You need links to your site, and you should submit a sitemap.