Everyone faces this problem when starting a new website: how to get your website indexed by search engines as quickly as possible? This post will show you a quick way to get out of Google Sandbox with minimum efforts on your part.
Two Months To Fully Index Your Content
My access logs show that it took Google just about 2 months to fully reveal the contents of one of my newly created blogs. This obviously takes the usual lag of a few days it takes Google bots to index the most recent content.
Impressively enough, Google bots start indexing your new website in a matter of just few days. My blog was indexed for the first time when it was only 3 days old! Bear in mind though, I've pointed Google to it using its website submission form.
Easy Tips For The Best Results
Below are just a few really easy tips for your website optimization which will help Google index your content as quickly as possible:
- Use Permalinks
Permalinks are definitely the first thing to do. There's been a lot of talking about it on various SEO sites, and the general knowledge I've gained is that Google is likely to pay attention at how people would access your pages.Important: make sure your permalinks structure is well-thought beforehand, as it will be hard to change it at a later time.
If you're using a recent enough content management system or blog engine, you probably have no real directories with your articles and blog entries, but instead all the content is stored in a database, and nice URLs are made using permalinks. It's a simple enough concept: do some planning and make sure your URLs look the best.
No dynamic URLs – it's really important that you have as less variables in your URLs as possible (none ideally). Again, because it is important that your URLs are simple and easy to read and follow.
- Google Sitemaps
Google Sitemaps are the easiest and quickest way to let Google know what pages your website has. Not only can you provide the list of all the pages you want indexed, but you can also specify the importance of each page so that Google bots pay more attention to it.Google Sitemaps is quite a flexible service, and since it's fairly popular too, there are already tons of freely available tools out there to suit all your needs. I really liked the SiteMap XML script in PHP – you specify a link to it in your Google Sitemaps account, and every time Google accesses this script, it automatically scans your website and provides a ready SiteMap in XML form. Very convenient and pretty easy to configure.
- Have As Many Pages Of Real Content As Possible
All I had was 10 articles to start with, because I didn't want to put too much content online just yet. I wanted to see if it's possible to get out of Google sandbox with such a small number of pages. And here's the answer: yes, it is quite possible!.What make your content real? Here are just a few things to keep in mind:
- Write your articles yourself: DON'T grab texts from any online resources – this will not give you much weight in terms of Google search engine, as Google bots will be more interested in a fresh, original content
- Be unique: you need to be as original as possible – because only really unique articles and ideas will get the most interest. This is mostly to do with human readers of your blog and not Google bots, but I still think it's a good advice.
- Put Google AdSense ads on every page with the content
Luckily I've had AdSense account activated beforehand using a rather popular project of mine, so it was not a problem at all for me to stick a square block of AdSense ads onto every page with useful content.There is an opinion that having AdSense on your pages urges Google bots to come and index your pages more quickly simply because Google really has to have your pages indexed before it can provide meaningful content-targeted ads.
While it's not 100% accurate, because AdSense also is capable of scanning your pages on-the-fly and provide meaningful ads for the most obvious keywords in your content, I certainly see no harm in placing ads.
My ads became meaningful in just a couple of days, but I had to wait for another 2 months before my pages got visible in Google search results.
- Trackback to popular sites
I've only trackbacked to one site again because I wanted to see if it would be enough. It sure was enough! I got only 10 visitors or so from that website, but the point was made – I've been visited through an external link. A trackback is a great and simple way to let others know about your content. - Link to other projects of yours
There is definitely no harm in linking to other projects of yours, especially to the long-established and popular ones. If you have only a handful of projects (not hundreds), then it's also okay to link back to your project – it will not add much of a weight to your new project from the search engine point of view, but it would not look like you're trying to earn a better PageRank by linking from tons of your own projects neither.
As you can see, it's all been about letting Google know your site is out there and really has to be indexed fully at some stage. Sitemaps help Google find its way around your website, and AdSense could also be a useful hint to get your site indexed as Google cannot serve content-targeted ads without having indexed the content first.
But the best advice is to never stop experimenting! Some things might work for my projects, but will not for yours. Similarly, you can as easily come up with the most brilliant solutions to getting your site indexed in the least time possible. Just don't forget to share the knowledge! ;)
Speedlinking – 14/10/2006…
Just thought it’s about time I start sharing some of the useful posts I come across during my week.
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