Getting in Google

By Doug Brunner
Posted Monday, September 20, 2004

Get listed in Google

Google is a fully automated search engine, which means that they rely on Robots, or Spiders to go and find the web sites that are listed in their index. They say that there isn’t a real reason to manually submit your site, but if there isn’t another site on the net that’s linking to you, it’s going to be near impossible for Googles Spider to find your site and index it.

Manual Submission

If you decide to manually submit your site there is no guarantee if or when you will be listed. If you want to manually submit your site visit (http://www.google.com/addurl.html) and use the form supplied there.

Still Not Listed

If your site employs the use of frames that could be a big reason why your listing still isn’t in Google. If your “No Frame” tag for instance just says, “Upgrade your Browser” then you are excluding both search engines and visitors from your site. Try providing alternative content instead and see if that helps.

Sites that use frames are categorized on one or two topics, and displayed when a search query matches the topic. This means that your site is only getting a few topics listed at most, even though you may deal with many topics. If your concerned that this may be the reason your site is not listed visit (http://www.searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/article.php/2167901) for more information.

Page Rank

Your overall Page Rank also highly contributes to your Google listing. The number of other sites linking to you determines Page Rank. If the sites linking to you have a lot of sites linking to them, they will carry a bigger vote as opposed to a site with no links at all.

If you already had a low Page Rank, your listing may have fallen off, or may have never had the chance to be included. Try boosting your link popularity with other sites of a similar topic and see if that helps your Page Rank.

Make your site Google Friendly

Google has stated that their Spider can have difficulty indexing dynamically generated pages. To help avoid this problem with your links, make each and every one of your pages accessible from a static link. Do not use dynamically generated links. If you do use a program like PHP or ASP to generate you links, make a site map. Place every link on your site in this site map, and make them STATIC. Don’t use scripting.

To make sure Google find this “static” link to your site map use their link tool located in their (http://www.google.com/help/features.html) Features Section. See what pages of your site they have indexed, and put your static link to your site map on that page. (Along with all your other pages of course)

Closing Remarks

Try to avoid using excessive session_ids on your site. They often confuse Spiders, which may result in an incomplete indexing of your site.

Put content on your pages. Doorway pages with little or no content often get overlooked. Similarly, using pictures to describe important features about your site is also a bad idea. The Spiders can’t read what the picture is saying. If you have to use pictures include an ALT tag with descriptive text.

About The Author:
Douglas Brunner
(http://www.norics.com)
Administrative Director