Ten Pitfalls to Avoid to Get Indexed Fast

If Google doesn’t index you, you could have a major problem. If you have done everything right, you should be indexed rapidly and without a big delay, and any new pages you add should be indexed quickly as well. There are several reasons you could be passed over for indexing, so check these possibilities before you panic.

1. If you only submitted you site to Google for review, it might take some time for you to be indexed -up to a few weeks or even more. Be patient, and wait, or link into your site from somewhere you know is crawled regularly.

2. You might not realize or get notification when you are indexed by a search engine, so double check and make sure you really aren’t indexed before getting worried. There are several tools you can use to manually check if you are indexed or not.

3. Make sure that your pages are live and working before you submit them. If you submit before verifying that your pages exist, or mistype a url, you could go for a while before you come to realize your error – time you will still remain unindexed since Google can’t find your pages.

4. If you don’t have external links, you might stay unindexed until you get some, and you can even get indexed and later be dropped for lack of links. If this happens, simply resubmit after you manage to build up some solid external links.

5. Host on a isolated server if you can! Sometimes you can get banned just for being hosted on an IP that an already banned website is sharing. You get a bad taste that will make the search engines skip you.

6. Have clean urls. Several flags that can keep you from being indexed include ending your url in ‘.ext.’ or having ampersands or question marks in your url. These extensions can be assumed by Google to be binary and therefore Google will ignore them

7. Use a reliable hosting service that is up over 99% of the time. You could get yanked from the index just for not being up and running when the Googlebot visits and you are down.

8. Do NOT useblack hat SEO. Suspicious redirects make the engines suspect you of cloaking, and white on white text isa huge flag for spam. Either of these actions can lead to Google banning your entire site.

9. Don’t submit everything at once! Take it a day at a time, and submit the most important pages first. Otherwise the search engine may look at so many simultaneous submissions from the same domain as a different type of spam and ignore them.

10. If you have checked all the above, and your site is good to go, re-submit. Maybe the engine lost your submission. Technical ‘oops’ can happen even to the major search engines, so try, try again.

The most often seen reason sites and pages are not indexed on Google is ‘being evil’ and using wrong tactics in order to try and fool search engines into thinking you are more important than you are. If you are good, you should be indexed!