Why isn't my new website on Google yet?
Eva Pettifor
When we launch a client's new website I often get asked why the website is not listed on google yet.
Quick summary of how Google works
The life span of a Google search is less then 1/2 second, and involves quite a few steps before you see the listing of results. To understand how google will find your website, its helpful to understand how google works generally. This short video supplied by google explains it very well and can help you with adding search engine friendly content to your website. I've summarised below how this can apply to your website. Here's how it all works:
How does this help you?
I will summarise the main tips from the video above and explain this a little more:
- When you do a google search, you are searching google's index of the web, not the web itself
- You are already on the web with your brand new website but you now have to get into google's index (which is why your site isn't visible in google straight away).
- Google needs to find your website with software called 'spiders'
- So these spiders need to find your website first to include it in the index... the spiders crawl the web (billions of pages) periodically looking for new websites, this happens automatically and you don't need to submit your site to google. It doesn't happen instantly though, it may take a little while for google to find you...
- The spiders use various methods find, index and rank your website
- Amongst many factors, your website needs to have good quality contruction, have relevant content that contains your key words in a manner that reads well for humans (not simply listing keywords on a page) and preferably other (good quality) pages linking to your website. An important factor is the content/text you include in your web pages - if you don't include the key words, the spiders won't think your website is important for that particular key word. To find out if your website is in the index yet, go to the google searchbox and type: site:darwinwebdesign.com.au (replacing darwinwebdesign.com.au with your own URL)
- Once you are in the index, Google uses over 200 queries to decide exactly where a website ranks
- This article is just an overview so if you want to know the science behind the google page ranking system there are many books and websites that would explain this in more detail. It is a very complicated algorithm that google themselves do not even reveal to us...
Copyright Eva Pettifor, Simple Pages. Please seek my permission prior to reproducing this article in any way but feel free to link directly to this page if you wish to promote this content - thanks!
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