After 4 Days, The “Add Your URL To Google” Form Gets Fixed

As I reported days ago, over the weekend the popular, but virtually useless, add URL form on Google did not work. Google posted a known issue on Saturday, October 2nd. Today, October 6th, I am finally hearing reports that the add URL form is now working again.

Google’s message that the add URL form was down read:

The form to submit URLs to add to our index at https://www.google.com/addurl is currently not available. Our engineers are aware of this issue and working to resolve it.

Keep in mind that Google generally discovers new URLs on its own. Also keep in mind that the use of this form does not affect crawling, indexing, or ranking of URLs that are already indexed.

There are a variety of ways to make sure that Google finds new URLs for your website: we have linked to some of our Help Center articles about this on our FAQ entry about crawling and indexing. Thank you for your patience.

As you can see, Google seriously downplayed the importance of this add URL form. Personally, I’ve heard Google imply time and time again that it is not of any real benefit to use the add URL form. Most SEOs know that getting crawled and discovered from an indexed site via a hyperlink is a better way of getting indexed and if you want to supplement that, use Google Sitemaps.

In any event, it took Google about four days to fix this bug – honestly, I am surprised they did it so fast. It is not a critical part of the Google search interface but I guess the dozens of complaints in the forums on a daily basis got to them.

I should note that we do not know why the form went down. Maybe someone was auto-submitted URLs at an incredibly rapid pace? Maybe it has to do with something completely different? I don’t know.