Google has to drop public submission on Fetch / Inspection Tool

[Robert Charlton]

Continued from...

Big reductions in crawl-to-index limits on Google Fetch tool
March - July 2018
https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4893740.htm [webmasterworld.com]

As noted in the prior thread...

Google has put severe limits on the use of the Fetch Tool for submissions because they want to discourage its use by spammers....

It appears, though, that Google has continued to receive too many manual submissions, and thus chose to drop its public submission feature.

Here's the announcement on Twitter...
[twitter.com...]

Google Webmasters
@googlewmc
We've had to drop the public submission feature, but we continue to welcome your submissions using the usual tool in Search Console and through sitemaps directly.
3:25 AM - Jul 25, 2018

Thanks again also to Barry on seroundtable...
[seroundtable.com...]

Barry updated his article to note that...

It now looks like you need to be logged in to submit a URL either of these ways. The public URL tool is now 100% offline:

Google Search Console
To submit a URL to the Google to the Google index, either...
a) submit a sitemap or...
b) use our new URL Inspection tool.

John Mueller had previously suggested to SEOs not to focus on manual submission.

As noted in our earlier discussion, John also advised that Sitemaps (for mass submissions) is likely to be just as fast as direct submission.

I'm assuming that by removing public access, Google has now removed motivation for spammers to try to use the tool for lots of urls.

[keyplyr]

Incentive for quick indexing with hijacking should also diminish.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 6:59 am (utc) on Jul 26, 2018]
[edit reason] Fixed typo per poster request. [/edit]

[Dimitri]

Back to the old good days, where pages/sites were found from backlinks.

[rustybrick]

good old days? I do believe Google from almost day one had a add URL form.

[Rlilly]

@rustybrick absolutely and the general consensus back then was dont use the Add URL form.. rather wait for Google to find the site via a backlink.

[mack]

I think it was always questionable as to whether that original add url form actually did anything. I always thought of it as a way to "give them something to do so they don't contact us".

Mack.

[Dimitri]

[offtopic] I remember the time where guys were submitting your sites to search engines, and made you pay for it [/offtopic]

[aristotle]

You can still type the new URL into the regular google search box. I haven't done this in a long time, but if I remember, it will say "no results found", but also show you a clickable link to the URL. I always thought that doing this will make google aware of it and cause it to send googlebot to check it out.

[tangor]

I always thought that doing this will make google aware of it and cause it to send googlebot to check it out.

And it still might if you are logged in ... it was the PUBLIC facing submit that crashed and burned for exactly the reasons we all thought it would when it was first offered.

Doing it the way above ... g does it in their own time, if they decide to do it. After all, that logged in cookie still calls home. :)

[jpalmer]

@dimitri

[offtopic] I remember the time where guys were submitting your sites to search engines, and made you pay for it [/offtopic]

I remember BG*, when Alta Vista introduced url submission only to registered/logged in users, and everyone got up in arms because they thought it was the thin end of the wedge, and paving the way to the siloed e-commerce driven www!

*BG: Before Google :-D