Written by Adam Audette
October 30, 2007
How To Get A New Site Indexed in Google
In a recent issue I wrote,
"Let's have an answer contest of sorts. You can ask the list any question you have about Internet marketing, SEO, paid search, link building, online public relations, social media, email marketing, web analytics, or whatever. Okay to keep them anonymous. We'll collect the best ones into a set of "stumper questions" that I'll give to some LEDers who have the savvy chops of experience marketing online. (I love saying "savvy chops")
"Just who are these people with the savvy chops? I know a few... but I think this'll be more fun if you appoint yourself. Send me an email if you want a crack at answering some stumpers - you can get a link back and some publicity from this, so why not."
About 15 LEDers volunteered themselves for the task, and I received over 30 different questions for them. The result is an impressive collection of helpful answers on Internet marketing topics. We are publishing a series of articles featuring a single question at a time, with the first dedicated to this oft-asked problem. Enjoy!
The answer panel for this question is:
Chris Nielsen
Nielsen Technical Services
Scott Marino
Panda Imprinting
Michael Linehan
Marketing Alchemy
Thomas Schmitz
Marketing Piranha Blog
Portent Interactive
How do I get a new site in Google?
ANSWERS:
Chris Nielsen: If you have at least one link on another site, or your site is on a dedicated IP address, you don't have to do anything, Google and most of the other search engines that spider will find it. It may take 1-2 weeks, but they find almost every site that is possible for them to reach.
If you don't want to wait, you can go to Google's help section for webmasters and you can submit your site to them. This may speed up the process. And you may hear some people say that submitting is not as good as letting them find the site, but I have never seen any proof that this odd concept is true.
Scott Marino: Sign-up for a webmaster tools account at Google. Once there, install, the Google Sitemap Generator, create a sitemap file and submit it to Google. It should speed things up a little. Also if you have other sites that Google spiders, add a link to the new site. I have also found that opening up a Google Adwords account seems to help. I'm sure that the SEO experts have other methods, but these are pretty simple.
Michael Linehan: Get a healthy amount of links and content in place. (What that means depends on how competitive your industry is.)
Make an xml sitemap. Make manually, or ask your tech provider, or use this free generator...
Free version, up to 500 pages: http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/
If you make one manually, here is the basic syntax. This simple version is fine for a small site...
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<url><loc>http://www.companyname.com/index.html</loc></url>
<url><loc>http://www.companyname.com/page1.html</loc></url>
<url><loc>http://www.companyname.com/page2.html</loc></url>
etc. for all the pages you want crawled
</urlset>
Then put this autodiscovery line into your robots.txt file.
Sitemap: http://www.companyname.com/sitemap.xml
This will lead the spiders of Google, Yahoo, MSN and ASK to your xml sitemap.
Or for faster addition....
GOOGLE: Login to your account. Click "Add" button at top left. Click "General Web Sitemap." Submit the xml sitemap to Google using the functions inside your account. If you don't already have an account (free), go here https://www.google.com/accounts/NewAccount
YAHOO: Go to http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/. Put the full url of the xml file, i.e. http://www.companyname.com/sitemap.xml
ASK: Just use this link (once the xml sitemap is prepared) with your company name in the url.
http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http://www.companyname.com/sitemap.xml
MSN: Currently, you cannot submit directly to MSN. They will find the sitemap by auto-discovery. (This also works for the other three.) Another way into MSN is through the news aggregator, "Moreover." Just click on this link, and you will be submitted automatically. http://api.moreover.com/ping?u=http://www.companyname.com/sitemap.xml
RESUBMISSION: You do not need to resubmit, unless you make changes and want them registered as close to immediately as possible. Otherwise, the major search engines will come back periodically and re-crawl the site through the xml sitemap.
Thomas Schmitz:
1. Get links from other web sites. If you have even one quality link Google will index the page that link points to very quickly. The more links you have the more pages you will get indexed.
2. Publish a blog. Blogging applications can be configured to ping Google. Once pinged or notified, Google Blog Search can list your new content in as little as an hour and that content can be in the regular SERPs within a day.
3. Submit your content to Google. This puts your content in line to get crawled...the back of the line. Actually, don't bother with this. The only reason I mention this is because one of the oldest SEO scams in the book is to charge you to submit your content on your behalf on a frequent basis over a period of time. This will do nothing for you.
The bottom line is this:
- Links from other web sites = indexing, crawling and ranking power.
- The more links you have the more frequently Google will spider your site.
- The more links you have the more pages Google will spider.
- The more links you have to deeper content the more pages you will get indexed.
Now here is the bad part. Some search ranking factors are age related and you simply cannot change those. Google is naturally suspicious of brand new web sites. So, include as many signs of quality as you can -- search for SEO signs of Quality -- and publish good content on a regular schedule (don't stop) and get links from other web sites.
 also check out
LED Digest 2524: Ask the Experts, Vol 1
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