There is no registration form, no fee, and nobody you need to hire. You verify the domain in Search Console and submit a sitemap. That is the whole of it. The part that takes real work is separate: finding out what is stopping Google from keeping your pages, and giving it a reason to want them.
The ten minutes that count as "submitting"
Create a Search Console property, prove you own the domain, and paste your sitemap.xml URL into the Sitemaps section. If the site runs on WordPress your SEO plugin already generated one. The format is documented in Google's sitemap guide. And that is the whole procedure. A sitemap is a request, not an instruction. Google decides what to crawl and what to keep. Anyone charging you for "site submission" is billing for a ten-minute task you can do yourself, and it was never the thing standing between you and the results page.
Why pages do not get indexed
When a site arrives with pages missing from search, it is almost always one of these. Ordered by how often we actually find them.
A robots.txt left over from staging. The site was built on a temporary domain with crawling closed off, and nobody removed Disallow: / during the move. The robots.txt introduction spells out exactly what that line does. It is remarkable how many sites spend months invisible because of it.
The WordPress "discourage search engines" checkbox. Settings, Reading, the box you tick during a build so nobody sees the half-finished version. The noindex tag works flawlessly, including on days you have forgotten about it.
A server that answers you but not the crawler. You will not spot this from a browser, because your browser gets the page. On this very server we hit a case where the nginx configuration swallowed error response bodies: a page that should have returned a 404 with readable content returned an empty body instead. Nothing looked wrong to a visitor. To a crawler it was a page with nothing on it.
A cache layer serving a version from months ago. Sites behind page caching and an edge cache can keep serving something that was correct once. The only test that means anything is looking at what the crawler receives, not what your logged-in browser shows you.
Working out which one it is
URL Inspection in Search Console answers this and most people only read the top of the panel. Enter a URL, run the live test, then open the rendered HTML. Check three things: the status code, what the robots tag says, and whether your actual text is present in that HTML. The third of those is where JavaScript-heavy sites come apart. If the main content is assembled by script after load, it may simply not be there in the rendered view, and your problem was never submission.
Indexed is not the same as findable
A page that is indexed but nowhere in the first thirty results does not really exist. Once indexing is settled, the next question is what query the page was built for and who types it. Where SEO actually starts sets the order of work, and the checklist we run before publishing anything covers what to confirm first.
Measure before and after so you know what the fix did. Checking a page's real position is worth reading, because searching for yourself in your own browser is not measurement.
People ask how long this takes. No honest number exists, and anyone offering one made it up. What can be said: a brand new site with nothing linking to it gets crawled later than a page you linked to from an already-indexed page on the same site. The cheapest thing you can do is link to new pages from older ones. It costs nothing and beats every "instant indexing" service on the market.
When hosting is the cause
On oversubscribed shared servers, response time climbs during busy hours, and the crawler waits exactly like a visitor does. The difference is that visitors complain and crawlers just come back less often. We run our own hosting, which is why this is visible to us; if your site lives elsewhere, measure server response at peak, not at 3am. Our hosting exists for that reason, but measure before you move.
The limit on this advice: if your site has ten pages and one of them is missing from the index, hosting is not your problem. Server capacity starts to matter when you have thousands of URLs and crawl rate has become a constraint.
Questions we get asked
Should I submit to Bing as well?
It takes ten minutes and does no harm. Whether it deserves a place in your priority list depends entirely on where your audience is.
What about "free submission to 100 search engines" tools?
There are not 100 search engines with an audience. Those lists are directories and their links carry nothing.
How many times should I request indexing?
Once. Requesting again does not move you up a queue, because there is no queue to move up in.
If you have been through all of this and the page still will not stick, the problem is probably quality rather than plumbing. That is the point our SEO service starts from: working out who the page was written for before touching anything else.
Last reviewed: August 2026
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