Why Can’t Google Find My Website?
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?
Well, to anybody who has a decent amount of knowledge regarding search engines and how they operate, it will be immediately obvious that there are almost certainly no inbound links at all pointing to the new site, and no effort has been made to inform Google that this site exists and should be crawled.
The really sad thing is that this is a very straightforward procedure which should be carried out by every web design company as a matter of course, otherwise the poor business owner will be left with a website and no one knowing it’s there.
What can be done to sort this problem?
When there is a link on someone else’s website pointing out your website, this link creates a pathway for the search engines to find your website. In other words, when the search engine robots are crawling through the other persons site and discover your website link, this enables them to follow your link, find your website and include it in the search index. To create this inbound link, there are many free online business directories allowing you to list your business and your website URL, therefore creating that all important link for their search engines like Google to follow and find you. Like I said, many are free so it 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 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.
