We’ve said for years that “submitting” your site to search engines was a waste of time. It’s typically not harmful, but it’s of no value. Companies that offer “search engine registration” for websites are either misleading or shady, but in either case they’re completely ineffective. Now Google has come out to explicitly state that those kinds of submissions indeed are scams.
A few days ago, Google’s John Mueller said the following:
Ignore scams like “Domain name search engine registration,” which nobody needs — your site shows up in search just fine without it.
Of course, that doesn’t stop companies from offering that service, likely to add to the list of SEO services that they provide in an effort to appear more comprehensive.
That said, there are some things that you can submit to Google which may help. The most important is your “XML sitemap”, which tells Google about every page on your site in the hopes that they’ll visit all of them. We discussed it a few years ago, but adding your XML sitemap to Google Search Console (formerly “Google Webmaster Tools”) can help a bit.
(via SE Roundtable)
