This is one of the most basic questions that SEO professionals face on a day-to-day basis. For some reason, executives and non-technical managers believe that manually submitting sites is one of the criteria that enables you to get ranked higher on search engines. That is not true, however. You are not going to get brownie points for submitting a URL to search engines manually. But should you?

Based on my experience, it is always better to wait for crawlers to find your site by themselves. If you are optimizing your site for search engines by adding content and gaining valuable incoming links to your pages, then crawlers should be able to find your site and index it unless you are doing something nasty such as faking traffic or incoming links to your site. Technically, you shouldn’t have to submit your site to engines manually. But if 3-6 months have gone by and you are not still indexed by search engines, then it is reasonable to try manual URL submission. Having said that, you don’t want to resubmit your site for a couple of months though. I have heard stories about people who have gotten banned for submitting their sites a bunch of times in a matter of few days. So it is possibly true that you can get banned for going extreme on a search engine. If search engines can’t find your site, the best bet is to check what you are doing wrong and not what they are doing wrong. And as always, SEO requires some patience so don’t jump your guns.