If search engines don’t know your website exists, your chance of ranking isn’t an improbability; it’s an impossibility.

But do you still need to submit your website to search engines in 2021?

How to submit your website to DuckDuckGo. DuckDuckGo doesn’t allow website submissions. They discover and index websites from over four hundred sources, including DuckDuckBot (their web crawler), Wikipedia, Bing, and other partners. There’s nothing you need to do here other than submit your website to Bing.

How to submit your website to Bing

Log in to Bing Webmaster Tools, select ‘Sitemaps’ on the left menu, paste in your sitemap URL, then hit ‘Submit sitemap.”

If you have multiple sitemaps, repeat the process.

How to submit your website to Yahoo

Bing’s index powers Yahoo. By submitting to Bing, you will automatically submit your site to Yahoo. So there’s nothing to do here.

How to submit your website to DuckDuckGo

DuckDuckGo doesn’t allow website submissions. They discover and index websites from over four hundred sources, including DuckDuckBot (their web crawler), Wikipedia, Bing, and other partners.

There’s nothing you need to do here other than submit your website to Bing.

How to submit your website to Baidu

You only need to submit to Baidu if your website targets people in China, where Baidu has a 66%+ market share. Because the process is quite convoluted, we won’t discuss it here. But here’s an excellent guide to Baidu submission in case you need it.

How to check if your website is indexed

Many similar guides say to check indexing status by searching Google for site:yourwebsite.com. However, this is unreliable and won’t reveal whether a site or page is indexed. Using the tools provided by search engines themselves is the only reliable way to check indexing status.

For Google, head to the Coverage report in Search Console, select the ‘Valid’ tab, then hit one of the lists under details to see indexed URLs.

If you want to check the status of a particular URL, use the URL Inspection tool.

For Bing, use their Site Explorer and filter by indexed URLs. You can then explore all the pages on your site that are indexed. To check individual pages, use their URL Inspection tool.

How to fix indexing issues

If your website or webpage isn’t indexed, the first step is to figure out why. You can’t hope to fix the issue unless you understand what went wrong.

To do that, paste the URL into Google’s URL Inspection tool and check the coverage error.

Here are a few common issues in Search Console and what they mean:

• Excluded by ‘noindex’ tag. Google is blocked from indexing the page because of a noindex robots meta tag. Remove this from the page if it should be indexed.
• Blocked by robots.txt. Google can’t crawl the page because it’s blocked in robots.txt. Remove the block if it should be indexed.
• Page with redirect. Google won’t index redirected pages, so remove the redirect if the page shouldn’t be redirected.
• Duplicate without user-selected canonical. Google believes this page is duplicate content and has chosen to index what it believes to be the canonical instead. Usually, this isn’t an issue, but you should investigate further if you believe the page should be indexed.