A common misconception exploited by some search engine optimization companies and online services to generate business is that a website has to be submitted to Google in order for it to appear in its index. This was true in the early days of the internet, but as the Google program that crawls the internet has become better at tracking data and following links, the need to submit your website (or other web properties such as Facebook pages) to Google has diminished.
Google still provides an online submission form, but there is no need to use it as long as you can get a link pointing to your site from somewhere on the internet. Having your site discovered through an inbound link is better because the link tells Google that somebody likes your site/page enough to link to it (enough if that somebody is you).
The Google tool that indexes the internet is called Googlebot. This is a small program that constantly crawls the billions of online pages looking for and following links. As the Googlebot crawls these pages it follows every link it finds. If it is the first time the Googlebot has come across a page, it indexes that new page and follows all the links from it (and indexes the subsequent pages it finds).
There is a link attribute called NoFollow that tells Google not to pass any link value onto the target page of a link using NoFollow. This is what Google says about links that have the NoFollow attribute attached:
In general, we don’t follow them. This means that Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links. Essentially, using nofollow causes us to drop the target links from our overall graph of the web. However, the target pages may still appear in our index if other sites link to them without using nofollow, or if the URLs are submitted to Google in a Sitemap. Also, it’s important to note that other search engines may handle nofollow in slightly different ways.
How do you get your first link?
The point of your first link is to make Google aware of your site. Once you have done that Googlebot crawls the rest of your pages and adds them to the index.
Getting that first link is not as difficult as you might think. There are loads of sites out there where you can create a free blog, write a short post and include a link back to your site. Here are three examples for you – WordPress.com, Blogger and Tumblr. If that sounds too much like hard work you can send a tweet through your Twitter account (What is Twitter?) or you could visit a blog you like to read and comment on a recent post (most blogs allow you to include a link with your comment, but be nice and say something constructive).
There are other ways too, such as submitting a sitemap to Google, writing an article and submitting it to an article directory such as Ezine Articles, submitting your site to a quality web directory, creating a press release or getting a link from a friends website.
If I haven’t convinced you that you do not need to submit your URL to Google, here’s a link to the form.
