(Entry was posted by Michelle Kor on this post in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 02/28/2019).

Do I have to submit a page in order to be crawled?

Crawling a page So someone told me in order to submit a page to be crawled, I have to do this, right? "You can also create a XML sitemap for your site and submit it in Google Search Console.
You can see the list of indexed pages in Search Console." But how long after I do that is the page crawled? Thanks

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YOUR ANSWERS

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

Scott Clark: A sitemap is not (currently) required, but I think it`s a wise idea to aid search engines with discovery. This is especially true on new sites or sites where major structural changes or migrations have occurred. It can help search engines discover the "nooks and crannies" of your site.

Bing, for example, seems to be getting away from crawl-discovery and moving towards Sitemap-based discovery.

If the site already has links to it, Google will likely find and crawl the site no matter what. It can take a while for Google to crawl the whole thing, but it will.
Dave Elliott: Sitemaps will tell Google which pages you want to be crawled and if you submit it to Google search console it will find it more easily...if your site has a sensible navigation structure and no massive technical problems it should find your pages.....as for how long standard seo answer of it depends. If it`s a popular site which regularly attracts links then it could be all but instant, if it`s a small site it could take a couple of weeks or longer.
Rob Woods: depends on when they crawl the sitemap... usually from very soon to a few days. As noted, do a fetch and render in Google Search Console and "submit" for indexing. I find the page should appear in the index in minutes to hours.
Perry Bernard: Sitemap.xml is not a guarantee of page crawl.
Michael Martinez: You can use the URL inspection tool to submit a page for immediate crawling and indexing. That doesn`t mean it will be fully evaluated and integrated into the database right away but pages that are eligible for quick indexing should begin appearing in "site:" queries in a matter of minutes or hours. That said, if you have a lot of pages you want crawled, you should submit a valid sitemap. But you also want to create a strong, well-structured on-site navigation and cross-referential link profile so the crawlers keep coming back. Just don`t create a flat site architecture (where each page links to all the other pages). And keep the navigational links per page to a reason number (a few dozen at most, not hundreds).
John Albin: You will get mixed thoughts on the necessity of a sitemap. Best practice is to submit it and wait about 24-72 hours for the new page(s) to be indexed.
Michelle Korn: Ok, so I submitted it & Google is REFUSING to index it :(

Why?

And no it`s NOT b/c it`s short. It`s a very long article actually.
Michael Martinez: Did they give you a reason for saying it`s not eligible for indexing?