As discussed yesterday, it is no longer true that you have to do something – “submit your site to the search engines” – to get indexed or re-indexed by Google and others.
Nevertheless there are situations where you want Google to index or re-index your website or a new page sooner rather than later.
This is true when you do a whole new site. Also if you have a blog you may want to make sure your new postings get indexed as soon as possible, particularly where postings are time sensitive.
What can you do about this?
Submitting a site map is the usual solution for a new or completely redone site. Google, MSN and Yahoo (the big three of search engines) have established a common protocol. You can read about how to do this at www.sitemaps.org.
Many blogging programs such as Movable Type and WordPress have facilities for “pinging” search engines – notifying them of updates to your blog.
If your blog is on Blogspot, all you need to do is check the options to allow “site feeds” and “allow search engines to index.”
Also weblogs.com and Technorati are services you can use to inform search engines manually or by setting up to automatically ping them when you make changes to your blog.