Is Your Website Listed on Google?
That’s one question you would want to know the answer to right away. Most businesses have a website but a fair bit of these websites are not indexed or archived by Google. This means that when anyone tries to search for your site or services/products that you are offering, your website will not be listed in the search results!
There are websites that have gone “live” for months but are still not indexed. Some people will tell you that “eventually, the search engine will stumble upon your site and index it.” Well, that brings us to our next point:
How Not to Get Indexed by Google
- Waiting for Google’s bot to find and index your site
Millions of new webpages are created everyday, the chance of Google stumbling on your site and indexing it is as good as none. - Submitting your site to Google
Now you’re taking some action, but the fault is Google’s (sort of). Google makes no guarantees that they will review and list your site even if you have made a manual submission. Still it works for some, if you’re feeling lucky head over to here.
- Submitting your site to directories like Yahoo and the Open Project.
Don’t get me wrong, these methods do work, but you’d have to pay Yahoo a fee to get them to review your site (else it’s the same no guarantee policy) and while the Open Directory is free, it takes awhile to get your site reviewed and listed.
How to Get Your Site Indexed
First you’ll need to identify a website that is already being indexed by Google. It’s best to get help from a webmaster whom you know would be willing to provide a link from his website to yours (some businesses choose to pay for a link just for the first month). You can search for the site (where you will be linking from) on Google and clicked on the “cached” link below the results. You will then be able to see when it was last indexed. If the cached date is very close to the current date, then it is a good indicator that Google frequently indexes this page. The next time the Google bot comes and index the site for updates, it will follow the link to your webpage and start to index your site.
Search Engines: Friend or Foe (Pt 2) | Antidote Internet Marketing Singapore on Wed, 4th Mar 2009 6:59 pm
[...] Remember that before a search engine can display your webpage it has to have a record of it. Search engines send out an automated program known as a spider or a bot, that goes to a website and starts to make a copy of all the content on the site. Once it has gotten enough information, it brings these results back to the search engine for indexing. Within this information, there are links to other sites, and the spider will then follow these links to the new websites and index them. This means that if you place a link to your website from another site that is already in a search engine’s cache (or records), your site will get indexed faster. Read more about getting your site indexed in Google. [...]