Is your website in the Google Index?

A Great article from my SEO expert - Ben Kemp
Can’t Find Your Site on Google?

If you wonder why your site does not appear in a search on Google, you can quickly check if its actually being indexed… try the following search;

“site:www.yoursite.co.nz” and of course, replace “yoursite” with the URL of YOUR site! e.g. site:www.trout-consultant.co.nz

This should produce a list of all the pages in your site that Google has found, and decided were worthy of indexing. If no pages were found then you need to call The SEO Guy - Ben Kemp.


Google offers several similar little tools, if you go to Google Webmasters Tools. Each of these tools provides useful information about your site, and an insight into the way Google “sees” it. In a Google search box, just type the operator and your domain name (less the http://www/ portion as per the previous example.)


e.g.
site:babyboomersguide.co.nz will list all the pages that have been indexed by Google
allinurl:babyboomersguide.co.nz will list all the pages that refer to your site's URL
link:babyboomersguide.co.nz will show every website that is linked to your site
cache:babyboomersguide.co.nz will display the current cache of your site
info:babyboomersguide.co.nz will show all the information Google have about your website
related:babyboomersguide.co.nz will show a list of websites that are similar to your site
See the Internet Glossary if any of the above terms are not familiar.

Google Sitemaps

Signing up for a Google SiteMaps account is also a good move as a great deal of extra information about your site - as Googles sees it - is available. This includes Crawl and Index errors, and also a range of Crawl & Index statistics. It is possible to gain an insight into what keywords Google associates with your site - both from the site itself, and from the sites that link to it! The errors (if any) are very important, as they may reveal sound reasons for google not indexing your site fully.

Whilst submitting a sitemap is in itself no guarantee of inclusion, or of rankings, it can help get all pages indexed and at the same time ensure that appropriate emphasis is placed on the most important pages. E.g. that the Product/Services pages are treated as more important than the About Us, Privacy Statement etc pages.

If your site does not show up in the site:yoursite.com search, you certainly have a problem that you need to get to the bottom of! There can be avariety of reasons for exclusion from Search Engine idexes, including;

* Insufficient incoming links - some Search Engines think that if no one links to you, then you are not worth indexing…
* You have duplicate content - multiple domain names pointing to the same pages
* Other transgressions such as hidden text, excessive use of doorway pages, cloaking etc

For more information on Search Engine Optimisation, go to Ben's website:
http://www.comauth.co.nz/the-seo-guys-blog/