I guess I should amend my statement above to it won't get them to crawl your site any faster than they will by following links into your site. My bad.

I too would like to know how long ago the test was done since things do change. I have no doubt that at one time you would submit your URL and in short order a spider visited your site. I don't think it's the case that they will come so soon now. I'd also be curious in knowing how soon the the page was crawled. Was it a day, a week, or three months. At some point in time it's practically the same as not being crawled at all since you would likely have built some links to the site by then.

And again I'm not saying there's anything wrong with submitting. I'm saying that there are other ways to get crawled that are a better use of your time.

gringo that's really my point and I think the point of anyone who says submitting is a waste of time. You should be building links anyway and search spiders will follow those links. So even if it only takes 30 seconds to submit why bother if you're going to be doing other things to get the engines to crawl your site anyway.

Originally Posted by ForrestCroce

How long ago was "some time back?" Ten years ago you could go to the top of AllTheWeb or Excite by using the same word a lot on a page. Five years ago, the web was small enough that the submit a URL queue for a major search engine was manageable. Heck, a while ago people thought the idea of indoor lighting was crazy. As fas as internet and search technology changes, "quite some time back" is meaningless.

Sometime I meant 8-10 months back and not more than that.

Originally Posted by ForrestCroce

An orphan page sounds like your friend submitted a page on a site the engines already knew about. They may have found a link to a directory listing. The engine may have crawled their submission. It's impossible to say.

It was not my friend but some of the Guru's of sitepoint and Orphan page means it does not link to any page on the web and no one links to that page. It has no ads nor adsense. It was just submitted through the Add URL and it was found in the google cache after a month or so.

A month makes sense, but that's also my point. A month is a long time for a spider to find you. You can get them to visit in a few hours with the right link. It's been years since I've submitted a site to a search engine and I don't think it's taken more than a week to get any new site visited and usually indexed completely.

That's why I say it's not worth the time to submit no matter how little time it is. You can get the spiders to come faster by building the links you need anyway if you're going to rank.

Originally Posted by vangogh

You can get the spiders to come faster by building the links you need anyway if you're going to rank.

Thats the best solution but what I am saying is Google has put up the "Add URL page" which is used and its not just for the sake of having a form for submission.

The "Add URL" page is more to stop people asking how "How do I add my site to Google" than a functional entity.

I think this

We do not add all submitted URLs to our index, and we cannot make any predictions or guarantees about when or if they will appear.

from the very page in question sums it up pretty well.