I’ve had a few readers write to let me know that they’re having trouble getting indexed by Google and asking for advice.
There are a lot of different theories on how to get into Google’s search returns but by far the simplest way to do it that I’ve found is to simply get a link from another site that has already been indexed by Google that Google sends it’s bots to regularly.
Of course you can also submit your site to Google to be ranked or use a search engine submission program to do it – but I find the link option works pretty well in most cases for me. It might take a few days, or even a week or so in some cases, but in most cases it works reasonably quickly.
As bloggers the best way to do this is to write quality content that other bloggers will link to and to interact with other bloggers on their blogs (genuinely) via their comments. This is all it should really take to get indexed by Google. Of course then you have the challenge of getting to the top of the list for the keywords that you’re wanting to target. This is another story and is not quite so simple and some people spend their lives working on this task. Again there are many theories out there.
My advice in climbing the rankings is similar to getting indexed. In order to climb the rankings you again need other sites to link to you. In my mind this is the most important aspect of good SEO (search engine optimization). There are of course other factors, but what it largely comes down to in my experience is inbound links from other sites (relevant, highly ranked ones using the keywords you want to rank for to link to you ideally).
Does anyone else have any other tips for those exploring this? Feel free to add yours below so we can all learn.
There are many ways one can get indexed in google.Two of them has already been discussed here- one is getting linked to another blog and other is by submitting sitemap.There are some more-
1)verify your site/blog in google webmaster tool. I have observed this many times.Once i verify a blog , it get indexed pretty fast. I am not sure about how it works but my guess is-
once you place the verification code and hit ‘verify’ button in webmaster tool,google sends spider or crawler to ensure the verification code (a metatag) exists on your blog/site and in process indexes your website.
2)sign up with google analytics and place the tracking code on your site
Again I am not sure how it works but my obvious guess is similar.Once you place the tracking code google sends spider to crawl your blog to ensure you have placed the code right and in process indexes your blog.
3)sign up with google adsense I have learned this trick from Brad Callen.According to him once you sign up for an adsense account google reviews your site before including it into the program.Brad says ,it is google bot which
reviews a site and not any human reviewer.While reviewing the bot indexes the site.
To ensure faster indexing you shouldn’t rely on a single tips or trick.You should use combination of tricks.Best practice would be to apply them all.
I too run a site that is indexed very high in Google for several keywords. When I began a new site I included a link from my indexed site to my new site. In a matter of just 48 hours, the Google bot had crawled the new site and indexed it.
ive also been indexed in a day using the xml sitemap generator
I’ve tried quite a few of these techniques, but still have many pages in my site indexed that really shouldn’t be relative to their relevance and others with very relevant original content that just isn’t indexed. Bit tricky what’s going on behind the curtain?
http://www.surgical-instrument-pictures.com/salaries.html
Great information! Thank you for your help. I am trying to index a site now. I know this info will help. I’ll let you know how I do.
been trying to get good indexes on my individual posts on google and so far haven’t had any luck. my main page is listed but not the individual posts.. I use blogger.. is there a trick? http://www.dellserverguru.com
I’ve just now tried the digg method…within hours google indexed the page with my link…my site hasn’t showed up in google yet but clearly the link was spidered so I imagine within 24 48 hours I’ll be there!
Ok, it’s been exactly 24 hours now since I have
1 – addurl to google
2 – pinged sitemap to google
3 – posted on digg
4 – started blog on blogger
5 – articles/links on about 15 social bookmarking sites
Results – not doing backflips just yet…for some reason unknown to me, google has indexed one of my pages but…why only the about us page??? That’s seems so very strange. How in the world did google follow the links but skip over all pages including the home page just to index the absolute most meaningless page on the site? Not complaining, one page indexed in 24 hours is certainly better than none! but…I just don’t get how I linked to the home page in every case yet it finds the stupid about us page lol. Hopefully this will change the next 24.
I have a number of my pages indexed in google but I want more of them indexed-Hell! All of them !- . I change things, update things constantly add to the site, and pray. Google still stays stuck on the same number of pages it initially indexed. Sometimes I think the algorithm is a mixture of female and cat dna. Hope no women read that-but you know its true. Its unpredictable and finicky.
http://thecomedynet.com
Thank you for your tips. My website was not getting indexed for about a week, but I see it indexed now in a day !
I gone through your instructions and hope my site will be indexed early.
Thanks.
Time is something that you have to take into account, it doesnt just happen over night, can take up to a couple of months to start getting a good ranking. A very good read, cheers Darren!
I followed your tips and got indexed in Google in one day. Thank you very much.
Thanks for the tips, superb.
I also use onlywire
Good tips. I’ve read many articles saying its about the links. Time will tell.
Yes, inbound links are weighed heavily upon.
I’ve read everything that has been said on this blog and I tried all the tips. It’s been close to a week and my blog still hasn’t been indexed. Please can anyone help me.
CJ Carter – it can definitely take longer than a week for a site to fully be indexed. Keep blogging and you’ll find it’ll happen. The best way to get in is to get a link from other sites – so quality content that another site sees and links to will work best.
PS: you’ll also find that because you have a blogspot blog that you’ll probably get picked up in the next week or so automatically as they are owned and crawled regularly by Google.
I put adsense and analytics code on my blog and also submitted a sitemap and I was indexed in about 48 hours.
Although I’m finding that google isn’t indexing all my pages either. In fact, some of the least useful are being indexed. I notice the indexing changing regularly because some pages that were indexed last night arn’t indexed tonight. However, a new page was added. Wierd…
Mike
http://www.bloggermike.net
Rightly said,even i wrote a article on this http://blogote.com/2008/the-seo/getting-your-blog-listed-in-google-within-13-min.html
I registered my domain name yesterday, and today it has already been listed in Google.
Here’s what I did:
1- I went to Yahoo answer, and answer some questions with my resource box linking to my newly created site.
2- I established a wordpress.com blog
3- I link to it from my blogspot blogs
4- I have 1 pr4 website with some pages listed in Google, and link from it to the site.
Thanks a lot. This is some great information. Ive been working on adding it to my site. Your site is awesome for someone like me who is pretty new to all this stuff.
Jeff
http://www.makethemillion.com
I have submitted my site to google and other directories. I have submitted a sitemap to google and have an HTML sitemap on my site. I am indexed – at 17 pages of my site out of 37 are anyway. My biggest issue is that my “/” page is showing the Domain default placeholder from when you first get hosting. I can not seem to trigger a new Googlebot visit – says last time it visited was May. My cache is the placeholder page and not the real page. Whats weird of course is when you click on the link for the page they say is the default domain page – it goes right to my main home page.
How do I get this fixed? I would like the default page cached correctly at least plus get Googlebot to visit again since I have made alot of updates.
Thanks,
This is all great, I’m working on a new site that needs to get onto google, it seems to be taking a while. Hopefully it’ll turn around soon…
I’ve having visitors in my blog via google search results. Yet, when I applied in one blog affiliate program it says my blog is not indexed by google. And a free PR button said my PR is 0/10.
I’m confused.
I was so surprised. I got indexed by google in less than 4 hours. I just followed the advice I got from a site: 1. submit to social bookmarking sites 2. go to digg, register and post comments with your URL . That’s it. My site got indexed immediately. No kidding. It was unbelievable. You got to try it for yourself.
Well first of all lets talk about getting your website indexed in the search engines. For me, it typically takes about a month to get a regular site listed in Google. However, some of my blogs have been indexed within days, especially if your using the Google friendly blog, blogger.com. Start by doing this: Submit your Url FIRST to some free directories, a lot of free directories and even link back to them as you see I have done below. But don’t let yourself submit to like 30 directories and then stop. It is an ongoing thing and you need to keep at it, and if you do not enjoy doing it, it is very easy to lose motivation doing it. Make a goal for yourself, that you will submit your website to at least 200 directories a day. Yes you might be sitting in front of your computer for a while doing the same thing for a couple hours which can be very tedious, but will pay off in the end. Trust me, within a couple weeks to a month, your site will be indexed. I never submit my URL directly to google. I will to Msn, Yahoo, and other search engines but I have found that the best way to get into the Google index is to submit your site to many other sites and eventually it will do it for you. Now, once your indexed, and even before your indexed, you need to start building backlinks. A backlink is basically a link to your site, from someone else’s site. Of course it helps a lot if the sites linking back to yours are relavant to your site. So if you have a website or blog that reviews products like cell phones, contact the other webmasters of like sites and request to do a link exchange. Some webmasters will turn you down for various reasons. I had one guy tell me my page rank wasn’t sufficient enough, which makes sense. In that case, just take the loss, build your page rank and 3 months down the line, request again. Writing articles related to your site and then linking back to your site in the resource box is always a great way to get traffic, better page rank and get noticed. Here is the main key, and I am sure you have heard this before, CONTENT THAT HELPS PEOPLE. If you can provide a block of instruction or information to someone who is looking specifically for that information, then your golden. People might even link back to you just for the simple fact that your content is rich, because hey, one day it might help them. Now, your page rank will update in time, but sometimes it takes a while. One of my sites, after only two months went from Pr N/A to Pr2. If you keep doing these things, keep submitting, go to social website and include yourself in discussions, keep creating great content that helps people then you are on the right track and soon your efforts will start to pay off. I think the biggest thing that you need to have when doing this is patience. It takes a while, its an ongoing battle and it will not happen overnight.
Thanks for your tips, I will try it, And i hope, my blog can get indexed by google in a day.
I can usually get indexed pretty quickly with Google, but this time it is taking me longer than normal. My typical strategy is to submit sitemap, install analytics, add to technorati, social bookmark, and add my rss feed to Google Reader.
I’m like most people on here, I don’t find getting indexed the problem, it’s getting a high page ranking that’s frustrating. I use blogger and not sure sometimes if anyone sees my blog but me and some friends. I have tried ezine articles, posting to forums and nothing seems to help. Does anyone know a reliable in-expensive ad service they have used?
William. PR is not really that important. Some SEO specialists say that high PR is important but not the most important thing. I have a PR of 2 and often rank higher than sites with greater PR. The most important aspect is relance.
Thanks a lot for the tips. I could get my new site indexed in Google in just one day and it is not yet dropped from the index.
Getting indexed on google at the start of one’s blogging career is the most important thing to do.
When I started my blog ( iSimplyBlog ) the first thing I did was to submit my blog to google search as well as google blog search.
Now lemme tell all of you, google search bot seems to be smarter than the google blog search one. I mean, even if you do not submit your site on google search, you would find it indexed whithin a few days. However, Google Blog search plays hard to get.
So I recommend submitting your blog to google blog search (I had blogged about it some time back here)
I have started a physics blog and it hasn’t been indexed yet, not even in the blog search engine! How much time does it take to be indexed on average?
This is some basic and practicle advice on getting sites indexed. This is someting I am asked about continually and I really appreciated this blog entry because my clients are always asking for this type of information. So a very big thank you to all who have submitted.
I have a free site that has 7 pr6 and 10 pr5s , already posted a link on blogger, verified my link in webmaster, book marked it, and done everything but dance, but i’ll do that to if it will get me indexed. I have to agree with with other sites that google puts you under probation for nine months now. My site is clear proof of that!
I have been having trouble getting my site:
http://justmytwocopper.blogspot.com/
to show up on prominent google searches. Thanks for the post, I will try some of your suggestions. Basically I’m going to try and cover my pages with the key words I am targetting and see how it goes over the course of two weeks.
yea, getting into google in one day, one week, etc. seems to be a thing of the past. the six-nine month period is retarded if you ask me. why should google be such an exclusive club to get into?
I have same experience with yours. My friend’s blog getting indexed by Google easily, and even most of his content get ranked well in First page of google because he always do blogwalking everyday
Thanks for these great tips. The one I found to be the most effective in getting my pages indexed has been the use of bookmarking my site. However, I do have one question, should I be bookmarking a site before it actually gets indexed by Google? I ask because the page I want indexed gets found through the bookmarks, but I notice that the page itself is not yet indexed by Google. So I’m wondering if this is actually hurting my site (duplicate content?). Anyone have any insights on this?
I have to disagree with the submit to google part. The best way to get indexed is to have good links comming to you. If you use the google submit you may wait a week or a month, while if you blogroll, get linked to by notorious bloggers, use blog ping, chances are you get indexed in a day or two.
It is nice that you would share these tips on getting indexed. I’m going to try it and I hope it does the trick because I can’t seem to get indexed. Thank you for sharing.
Thanks for this nice info. alos believe sitemap is great, my corecommerce store automatically generates google sitemap i can upload, works great.
I have new ways of blogging and easiest way to add static pages to blog.
Well, i feel the best way to get indexed is to submit content to social media sites. They do have a lot of traffic coming to them and so does the spider visits them frequently. The chances of a link to your site getting noticed increases which in turn increases the probability of the spider coming to your website and hence getting indexed.
Really a good post. Getting indexed in google is not difficult whereas getting a position against a target keyword is so difficult though. Writing a quality content is all we have to do as you said.
I sumbitted my new site yesterday to Google, uploaded a sitemap (created and uploaded a Sitemap using a free download – there are a number of them listed on Google’s Webmaster Tools – although a lot of them didn’t work). I also verified my site on Google’s WebMaster’s Tools.
Today I can see my site listed on Google – although I need to work on getting some links to it to boost the ranking.
Good luck to you all!
Merlin
http://www.watersanitationhygiene.org
Yeah.. I’m trying to get my cousing site listed. Normally all the sites I create, takes not a lot of time to be indexed, because they are created on WordPress. Maybe that’s a fast way of doing it.
For some reason, the two blogs that I am try to get up, won’t be indexed. Is it because I do not have enough content?
Willa
http://postmimi.blogspot.com/
I have created a blog about swine flu but It is not get ranking yet, I have added its url to google, yahoo and msn and also submitted to different free directories. I try to post on my blog almost everyday. Can you tell me when will my blog get rank ?