Google recently unveiled a new featured in the SERPs that allows users to manually submit any URL to their index.
Simply Google “Submit URL”, and you will see something like below:
Unlike XML Sitemaps within Google Search Console (which only indexes URLs on owners’ sites), this feature allows for a way to legitimately get 3rd party URLs into Google’s index quickly.
This has long been a challenge for SEOs. The need for ways to get 3rd party pages indexed led to the rise of “indexation services”, which have unknown and perhaps dubious methods for getting URLs indexed.
This submit URL tools allows for a legitimate, albeit somewhat limited, way to get URLs indexed. From our early observations:
- A hard limit of 50 URLs submitted (one at a time), after which you will be blocked for a few days.
- Captchas will start to surface after about 10 URLs.
- Occasionally the tool will redirect to Google Search Console to continue submitting URLs, so you’ll need a GSC account.
Despite the limits, this is a very welcome feature for the search community. Whether it’s a simple need to get indexed ASAP (for an important release), or wanting to get citations, press releases, or other promotional URLs indexed on 3rd party sites, it’s nice to have an “above board” method for accomplishing that.
