Is My Site Indexed By Google?

One of the most common questions you’ll have when you first publish your website or blog – Is my site indexed by Google? 

Many people make the mistake of thinking that Pagerank is the same thing as having your site indexed.  So, they try everything under the sun to get their site indexed, continue to see a pagerank of 0 and wonder what they are doing wrong…in fact they are not doing ANYTHING wrong.

There are ways to get your site, blogs and content pages indexed very quickly by Google – within hours often times, but Pagerank (the system by which Google uses to rank specific sites and pages) will take much longer – sometimes within days, sometimes within weeks, often it will take 1-month or more for any pagerank to show up. 

How can you check to see if your site or pages have been indexed by Google?

Simple, enter the following syntax in the Google search box:

site:http://www.yoursite.com

Of course, you substitute your own site, blog or page URL for the “yoursite.com” in the example above.

The results will tell you if your site has been indexed by Google.  If you get no results, then try some of the tips we show below.  If your pages have been indexed, then congratulations – you have achieved your first step on the path toward improved search engine optimization.  Your next steps would involve syndicating your content links so that legitimate, related publishers will link back to your page giving it additional pagerank over time. 

HOW CAN I IMPROVE THE CHANCES OF MY SITE BEING INDEXED?

If you publish good content, your site will eventually be indexed by Google and pagerank will be established over time, but there are some important steps you can take to get your content indexed faster.

Indexing occurs using Google bots that spider sites and will often follow links – this spidering activity occurs more often on sites that have a high authority rating by Google and that publish content frequently.   These types of sites may be spidered each hour. 

So, it stands to reason that if you can get your site listed inside one of these authority sites, your site will be found much faster than otherwise may happen.

Here are a few ways you can make that happen:

1. Create a blog…this can be a blog as your main page on your domain, a blog off of your domain in another directory or even a blog on an entirely new domain…the reason why blogs are so powerful as a tool to get noticed online by the search engines is that blogs are designed to syndicate content.  RSS – or really simple syndication – is a defined standard for sharing information with directories and subscribers meaning that by simply using a blog as it is designed to be used (including a Ping list that pings different directories and content aggregators) you can have your site automatically create links through major authority sites.  For example, a common ping site is Yahoo RSS – by setting up a free Yahoo account and subscribing to your own Yahoo RSS feed (you’ll want to subscribe to others as well), you will have your site spidered within hours.  Then, it’s up to you to continue to publish new content a few times a day over the next few weeks so that the search engines know to visit your site and index new content more frequently.

Other places to submit your blog RSS feed includes: Feedburner, MillionRSS, Feedage, Bloglines, etc…these will help you get indexed fast, create some good quality, authority backlinks into your site and get you subscriber traffic as well.

For a full set of workshops around traffic generation and blogging you’ll want to join InfoMarketer’sZone and uncover the 6-week InfoProduct Profits System for making money online with your own websites. 

2. Article directories…another way to syndicate content and get rapid backlinks from authority sites to your own site so it will quickly get indexed by Google is to write an article, include a link back to your site within the resource box of the article and submit it to high authority article syndication sites such as http://www.ezinearticles.com

For instance – this article we wrote just a few months ago called “Proven, How-To Book Writing Formula For Beginners” provided indexing extremely quickly to a new page on our site and has resulted in thousands of views and clicks by itself. 

3. Create a sitemap and try and keep your pages 1-2 levels deep, at least when you first start out.  You want ALL of your content pages to be indexed so make sure when the bot does come visit your site it can find your content quickly and easily.  If you create content that goes 3, 4 or 5 levels deep within your site – the search engines may take months to discover and index that content.

Next time you wonder, is my site indexed by Google – you have the methods to both improve your liklihood of being indexed and ways of searching to ensure your site has been indexed.  If you have not yet been indexed after taking these steps, then take a look at your site and make sure you have not breached any of Google’s terms of service by adding questionable search engine linking, hidden text or spammy type content on the page. 

Try these methods and let us know (by leaving a comment) how quicly you were able to get your latest page indexed?