Why my site is not indexed in Google?

Isn’t that one of the most common thing you hear in SEO?

That’s it; you now understand that internet is here to stay. It has become a fact that one must now have a website; it becomes almost as important as having a cell phone. It’s not a question of whether you like it or not, that’s just the way it is.

So here you are, following all what you heard about how an online presence could change your business with a top ranking from Google…

Your website is ready (or so you think), you submit it to Google and then… nothing happened!

This is panic time! What happened! So you go online and look for all the SEO forums you can find and post your thread:

“Why my site is not indexed in Google?”, you may even add that you have done everything, that you have submitted your sitemap too, that you have a few inbound links, etc…

Ok, let me summarize for you the indexing process:

* You create a website.
* You submit your website.
* Your website is queued to be crawled.
* Your website is crawled.
* Your website is analyzed.
* Pages considered relevant are indexed.

When you first create a website, don’t try to submit it until you’ve got at least 20 pages of quality content (I won’t detail here how your website should be made SEO ready), and preferably not over 100 where I would recommend not over 50 personally.

Why? The answer is fairly simple. If you want to be indexed by Google, you must abide by Google rules:

* Less than 20 pages, your website is not relevant enough, could be just a spam site.
* New quality websites are build over time, if you show up with over 100 pages at once like 1,000 or so, looks very much like the automatically generated spam site.

In addition, as a general concept, the more pages you have the less power and authority each one of them carries. A page considered highly relevant carries much more chances to be indexed that a page with little or no weight value.

In order for your site to be indexed, it must first be crawled. To be crawled, the googlebot need to learn about the existence of your website. How does it do that? By crawling.

It follows links all across the different websites it knows until it finds new content. If your site is not linked, it means that the googlebot will not be able to find you, unless you submit your request to be crawled.

Though it’s not a great solution. With so many new sites coming up everyday and so many sites updating their content everyday… the waiting list can be very long…

Here’s a summary of the crawling priority list:

1. Fresh content from authority sites.
2. Fresh content from other sites.
3. Random internet crawling.
4. Submission requests.

Yes, when you submit your site for inclusion, you come last on the list… so the waiting time just to be crawled can be extremely long… it could take months literally. Googlebot is like people, it doesn’t like much to be told what to do, however it loves to discover new content.

If only you could give googlebot a way to “find you”, you could be not only crawled but indexed with 24 hours or so! Once you are crawled, indexing will come naturally assuming your website is well designed.

The best way to have googlebot find you is to go where it likes to crawl!

* Googlebot is very fond of Wordpress. If your site is not on it, add a blog with it now. Just by having Wordpress (even without content), you’ll get listed quickly! Amazing.
* Get linked from authority sites. Although it’s almost impossible for you to get a link from an actual authority site, there are alternatives considered as highly by googlebot like aboutus.org and domaintools.com
* Get links from relevant sites. The more links you’ll get, the more chances you’ll give googlebot to find you, and the more you’ll show that your page is important and needs to be crawled and indexed quickly.

Sitemap, are just a tool used to help Googlebot know what pages you would like to have crawled. Now, that doesn’t mean googlebot will crawl all your pages in your sitemap (though it usually does), and more importantly, this is no way a guaranty that all your pages will be indexed!

There’s a huge difference between a page crawled and a page indexed.

Now that you know what googlebot is thinking, it’s up to you to use this knowledge to your advantage or not! Just remember, if you are not crawled, you won’t be indexed. If you are crawled by your pages are considered of too poor quality or relevancy, you won’t be indexed.

If you have any question, don’t hesitate to ask, I’m here to help!