subject: Why Won't Google Index My Website? [print this page] Time after time I chat to people who tell me that whilst they have had a brand-new website built some months back, their site is still to be indexed by the search engines. As most people have a pretty limited knowledge of what will be involved to get a website indexed, this can become an extremely frustrating waiting time that can cause there business many problems.
So what's going on here?
To anybody who has a fair amount of knowledge with regards to how the search engines operate, it will no doubt become immediately obvious that the new site is minus any inbound links, and probably no effort has been made to let Google know that this new site exists and wants to be indexed.
The really frustrating thing is that these procedures are extremely straightforward and should be carried out by all web design companies at the build stage as a matter of course, otherwise all that happens is the poor person is left with a website that nobody has a clue is there.
What can be done to sort this problem?
When a link on another website is pointing at your website, it is in effect creating a pathway for the search engines to find you. In other words, when the search engines are crawling the other site and discover your link, this will enable them to follow the link, find your website and index it. There are many excellent free online business directories that allow you to list your business and your website address, therefore creating a link for the likes of Google to follow and find you. This doesn't have to cost anything.
The other simple way to speed up the indexing of the website is for the website builder to login to Google Webmaster Tools and inform Google that the new site exists and that they should go crawl it and index it. The best way to encourage this is to install a sitemap.xml file on your server containing the URLs of the pages on your site and then informing Google of this site map in Webmasters tools. This is a simple procedure for your web builder and helps give Google a push.
These two procedures are extremely easy for any web builder to carry out and absolutely should be put into place as a matter of course. It goes without saying that some extra inbound links would make life even easier and help speed the process even more - and eventually help your search engine ranking too.
So there it is. If you are one of the unfortunate people who have had a new website built and are still sitting patiently, waiting for the search engines to index your site, you could well have a very long way if is these simple measures have not been addressed. If you are in any way concerned about this, don't be afraid to have a word with the company responsible for building your site and asked them politely if they can check that these imports and measures have been put into place. If not, be firm and insist that they carry out these simple but necessary edits to get the all important Google ball rolling as fast as possible.
