Invisible Websites, Part I
“How come my site doesn’t show up in Google?
How will customers find me?”
It’s pretty frustrating to invest your time and
money in a company website, only to find that it’s
virtually invisible to search engines. You wouldn’t
want to print thousands of brochures, only to have them
gather dust in a storage closet. What good are marketing
materials if they don’t get seen?
When people tell me that their website isn’t
showing up in search engines, the first thing I do is
check to see whether the search engines even know that
it exists. If they can’t find your site, it certainly
won’t show up in the results for any search terms.
Once you have identified a website’s problem,
you can begin to optimize the site for better placement.
To determine whether your site can be found at all,
enter this into the Google search box: allinurl:www.mysite.com
(for Yahoo, type: site:http://www.mysite.com).
Check the blue bar at the top of the Google results
page for the total number of pages Google found. It
may not display them all, but there will be a link at
the bottom that says:
In order to show you the most relevant results,
we have omitted some entries very similar to the 2
already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the
search with the omitted results included.
When you click on the link, you’ll see all the
pages in your website that Google is aware of.
If absolutely no pages show up, then even your home
page isn’t in Google’s index. Why not? Maybe
your website is so new that Google hasn’t found
it yet. The best way for Google to find your site is
to get other sites to link to it. You can use Google’s
submission page, but links from other sites work better.
If Google finds all of your pages, then at least you
know that your website is in Google’s database.
You need to focus your optimization efforts on making
those pages the best they can possibly be, to move them
up higher in the search-engine results.
If Google doesn’t find any pages other than your
home page, you’ve got a different problem. There’s
something about your home page that isn’t letting
Google find the rest of your pages.
In Part II of this article we’ll explore some
of the common reasons why Google can’t make its
way from your home page to the rest of your website.
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