How to get your site indexed by Google in less than 4 hrs
Mar
18
Written by:
2010/03/18 07:50 AM
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Today I got an irate phone call from a client telling me that their site is not working. They can’t find it. So I asked them if they were using their website address. They answered YES.
But to be sure I gave them the address again, spelling it out correctly. To my horror the voice on the phone said that their site was gone.
So I tried it myself, and to my relief the site came up. To cut a long story short, I found out that the client was entering his website URL into the Google search text box on Google.com
This brought in another problem. The site was not indexed by Google. The client wanted to see me in the afternoon, I suppose to tear my head off.
What was I to do? How could I make sure that the site was indexed by Google.
Well here are the steps I followed and in less than 4 hours, by the time I got to the client, Google had indexed the site.
- Submit the site to Google via the Google AddURL page. I had already done a that a few days ago, but just to make sure.
- Created a site map. I used one of the many online automatic sitemap generation tools available on the net. Logged into Google Webmaster Tools, added the site and submitted the XML sitemap.
- Added a bunch of back links on other sites to the client site. Including my site. Also went to three of my bloggers, Google Blog Spot blogs, and added a few links there. Figured Google should pick those up fairly early seeing that they won the blog platform.
- Used Twitter, and tweeted the site with a link. Did not use a URL shortener, used the full site URL.
- Added a note and a link on my Facebook wall. As many links as possible right?
- Created a Google Analytics account. Registered the site. Verified the site.
- Clicked each link I created, first to test if they worked, but also to register the link on Google Analytics.
- Created a robots.txt file, uploaded that.
- Logged back onto Google Webmaster tools. Went to the labs menu and Fetch as GoogleBot page. Entered a few of the site’s web pages to test. Not sure if this helped or not. But who cares, mainly to see what Google bot sees.
- Also under site configuration, tested out my robots.txt file by going to site configuration –> Crawler Access. Tested a few pages.
Now wait.
Drove to the client a few hours later. When I got there, we tested the site URL in the Google search text box. Viola, Google had indexed the pages. On top of that it said it did it 4 hours ago. That is just about an hour after I started my frantic process of getting the site into Google Index.
Which one did it. I don’t know. But probably a combination of submitting the site, submitting the sitemap, adding links, activating or using those links.
Related Reading:
Google PageRank – Is it worth all the fuss?
Does Google penalise back links from bad neighbourhoods or bad sites?
Even Google Does SEO – Read their report.
The top SEO myth of all time.
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