You do NOT need to pay to ‘register’ your website with a search engine. If anyone asks for payment to do this, ignore and report them 🤬
I just received an email from a client, who had received a “demand for payment”, otherwise her website would not be registered with search engines. The email looked very legitimate:
“Ignore ignore ignore!!” was the reply I sent.
Search engines do not charge you a fee to be indexed and any business that charges you, is just trying to scare you into paying a fee.
So how do search engines register your website?
Search engines such as Google are constantly on the lookout for new web pages to index. Note that I said ‘web pages’ and not ‘websites’ – search engines don’t index complete websites as one entry, but individual web pages.
A search engine will use software to scan the web for new and interesting web pages to index, ready to serve to users searching for specific content. These scans are done automatically.
A new web page can take up to two-weeks to be scanned and indexed by a search engine. You can speed this process up (or at least help it along) by submitting your website sitemap to the search engine.
Suggested reading: How to Submit Your Website to Google (ahrefs.com)
Whether you choose to submit a sitemap to Google, or let the search engine index your web page automatically – do NOT pay a company who claim to register your website as a requirement.