Introduction
It's been a question asked many times. Is it worth submitting my site directly to the search engines by using Google Webmaster Tools, Bing Webmaster Tools, or Yahoo! Site Explorer? Does it help my site get indexed faster, or even better, rank higher? Based on research we’ve collected internally and statistics from very reputable external sources we at IMI Software are of the mindset that no, it will not help your site get indexed faster nor will it help your site rank better.
However, that’s not to say you shouldn’t submit and verify your site with all three of these very useful services. There are a number of benefits for Webmasters. At IMI Software we submit and verify all of our client sites with each of the search engines. They all provide a number of tools that help a webmaster gain insight into the ‘indexability’ of a site as well as locate potential problems. And, they are all free services offered by the search engines.
Google Webmaster Tools
First let's take a quick look at Google Webmaster Tools. In the Site Configuration section you are able to submit a sitemap, view its status, see when it was last downloaded, see how many urls were submitted and how many are in the index. You’re also able to view the crawler status by testing your robots.txt file. There is also a section enabling you to set the preferred domain for the site to help prevent duplicate content, an issue known as canonicalization. There are also a number of tools to view search queries, impressions, clicks and variations over different time periods. There is also a section to view a list of inbound links to your site. You are able to view keyword significance as well. You can even see if the search engine detects any Malware on your site. It also will display a list any crawl errors to help you identify indexing problems. There are a few more tools provided but the ones mentioned provide more than enough reasons to show why it is important to utilize this great service.
Bing Webmaster Tools
Google Webmaster Tools happens to be the most feature rich but that’s not to say Bing Webmaster Tools and Yahoo! Site Explorer should be overlooked. Bing Webmaster Tools provides the ability to manage sitemaps and view statistics such as crawl summary including identifying any crawl errors. It also provides statistics on the number of your site pages included in the Bing index and a traffic summary so you can review up to 6 months worth of search query performance including keywords, impressions and clicks. Very useful information.
Yahoo! Site Explorer
Yahoo! Site Explorer also provides a number of statistics such as your site feed status and the ability to add and remove sitemaps. As with the Google and Bing Webmaster Tools services, there is a section that will identify crawl errors, search traffic statistics and trends, various site statistics such as the number of crawled pages, the number of unique domains linking to your site, and the number of outbound links from your site. There is even a tool to set up to 10 dynamic urls. Essentially, providing a free URL rewriter to streamline some of your more complex page urls. Though an advanced concept, it’s a great feature and help is readily available at the click of your mouse.
Conclusion
As you can see these webmaster tools accounts provide very valuable insight into how your site is being viewed by each of the respective search engines. And the many statistics that they provide help you measure your various SEO efforts. These tools should not be overlooked. They are very valuable to any webmaster and should be viewed as yet another tool to help you achieve your online goals.
As far as your site getting indexed faster, no worries, search engines are very efficient. To oversimplify it a bit - If you have a website, the search engines will find it. If you follow the recommended on-page seo techniques such as valid page markup, have a valid XML sitemap and a robot.txt file, the search engines should have no problem finding, accessing and indexing your site. In fact, the best way to speed this process up is get some high quality, relevant back links, a major component of off-page SEO. An in-depth SEO discussion is a bit off topic for this post but look for future posts about various areas of SEO, Inbound Marketing and even Social Media Integration.
About IMI Software, Inc.
IMI Software, Inc. is a Web Design and Development company specializing in web design and development, DotNetNuke, Social Media Integration, and SEO and internet marketing. We also specialize in the development of rental property management software.
*IMI Software, Inc. is in no way affiliated with Google Webmaster Tools, Bing Webmaster Tools or Yahoo! Site Explorer. All copyrights and trademarks are owned by their respective companies.