Knowledgebase

Google finds sites through a process known as "crawling" the web which involves robot software that follows hyperlinks from site to site. Google currently looks at more than 8 billion URLs during its crawls.

One of the most frequent questions new website owners ask is why their pages aren't listed when they do a search.

In short this is because the site is new, meaning there are few if any sites linking to yours, with the result that the Googlebot has not yet been able to find your site.

Links from other sites to yours are called Inbound Links. The search engines treat links that you get from other sites as if those other sites were "voting" for you as an authoritative or recommended site. Inbound links are the single biggest factor in determining which sites are indexed by Google, as most pages are found when Google's robots crawl the web, jumping from page to page via hyperlinks.

Apart from helping to ensure that the search engines find your site, inbound links can also help your site's ranking. If the text used for an inbound link contains one of your key search terms ie the words or phrases people might use when searching for your information, then the more sites that "vote" for you, the more relevant the search engines consider your site to be on that topic.

Often the link text will be the name of your site or business, but if possible you should ask that the link text contain your key search term eg:

Webeasy? provides affordable web design and a first class service.

You can check the number of other sites that link to your URL by typing link:http://www.yoursite.com into the Google search bar.

Google's order of results is automatically determined by more than 100 factors, including a sophisticated PageRank algorithm the details of which are naturally secret!

Every time Google updates its database of webpages, the index invariably shifts: new sites are found, some sites are lost and a site's ranking may change. Your rank naturally will be affected by changes in the ranking of other sites. No one at Google hand adjusts the results to boost the ranking of a site.

If you would like your site to return for particular keywords, then you must include these words on your web pages. The crawler analyses the content of webpages in Google's index to determine the search queries for which they are most relevant. If your site clearly and accurately describes your topic and many other websites link to yours, it will probably return as a search result for your desired keywords.

If you feel that certain keywords are essential to your site's success, you may want to consider Google Adwords - Google's targetted keyword advertising program. Your site will then appear in the list of sponsors shown on the right hand side of the results pages. You should note that advertising with Google neither helps nor hurts your site's ranking.

A word of caution. There are a number of unscrupulous methods employed by some websites to gain unfair advantage in search engine rankings and these sites risk severe penalties and will in some cases be banned from the index if their methods are found or reported by other website owners. Read more about ethical search engine optimisation in Tony Subia's excellent article which is reproduced with permission.

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