Simple Tricks To Getting Your Site Indexed

There’s two major obstacles for anyone trying to get their website listed in a search engine for ranking: Having it rank highly for a keyword and having it rank at all. Having your site noticed, or being indexed, is a bit of a challenge sometimes. You can build hundreds of links back to your website and still not even show up for a single result if you have a brand new website.

According to the Big G itself, there’s a couple of reasons your website may not be indexed yet. (And do keep the word ‘yet’ in mind.)

Although Google crawls billions of pages, it’s inevitable that some sites will be missed. When our spiders miss a site, it’s frequently for one of the following reasons:

• The site isn’t well connected through multiple links from other sites on the web.
• The site launched after Google’s most recent crawl was completed.
• The design of the site makes it difficult for Google to effectively crawl its content.
• The site was temporarily unavailable when we tried to crawl it or we received an error when we tried to crawl it. You can use Google Webmaster Tools to see if we received errors when trying to crawl your site.

So what exactly does that all mean? It boils down to three things, which are in the order of importance: Do you have backlinks from sites Google’s spiders crawl, has the bot crawled your site and can the bot navigate across your site?

Firstly, even if your newly-made site does have backlinks, they may not be from a website that Google actively crawls. For inactivate, relatively unchanging websites, Google’s spiders tend to crawl it only one or two times a month. While some of these pages can be quality backlinks, they may not show up immediately. If there are no baclinks to the site giving you backlinks, then Google’s bot will most likely not know about your own website.

Secondly, there’s the problem that Google’s spiders simply may not have crawled your page yet. Generally, this relates back to the first point of how often your backlinks are subsequently crawled.

Thirdly, with some websites that use alternative means of navigation, such as Flash menus or XHTML navigation, sometimes Google’s spiders have trouble navigating across your website. This also goes for any websites that are backlinks to yours. If the spiders cannot navigate from the main page of the site linking back to you to the page with the actual link on it, as in the case of a link on a profile, then it may not cause the spider to crawl your website and index it.

In addition to these three things, there’s also something known as the “sandbox effect,” which is essentially the fact that Google tends to put sites into a ’sandbox’ for the first three to six months of its existence. This is normal, but should only affect rankings, not whether your website is indexed or not.

To see if your website has been indexed, you simply go to Google, type in “site:www.website.com” and see if any results are returned. Hopefully at least your homepage is returned.

If it’s not and you’ve had a decent amount (at least five or six on active websites), there’s a few tricks you can try. The first off is to put your website in the signature of an internet forum and to be active and contribute. If you post in a thread that gets noticed by the spider, then you’re almost guaranteed an automatic indexing.

Another trick you can try is to bookmark your website (or page) with a social bookmarking website, such as Jumptags or Digg. After submitting, ping the submission with a tool such as Pingler.