Monday, August 23, 2004

How long before I get into Google?

There is no easy answer to the question of how much time it takes to be listed on google. There is no fixed period of time before any website gets listed on google. Infact, it depends on a variety of factors such as the popularity of the website, it’s design, content etc. The time it takes to get listed on google may range from a few days to upto 3 months.

To understand how you “get into” google, or get indexed by google, it’s important to learn how Google actually works. The “Googlebot” is Google’s indexing software. This Googlebot visits millions of websites, records the contents of these websites and makes them available to search for the users of Google. The Googlebot is essentially a software, it has a set of capabilities and limitations and algorithms it uses to index content.

What the Googlebot does is, in theory, very simple, when it visits a page it records all the links listed on that page and makes sure to visit them. This activity is known as “Crawling”. By crawling the Googlebot should be able to visit a majority of the websites on the internet. Therefore, having many sites link to you increase your chances of being visited by the Googlebot and thereby increasing chances of being indexed on Google quicker. The Frequency of the visit of the Googlebot also depends on the “Pagerank” of a particular website. The greater the pagerank of a website is, the more often google will index it.

Google adds thousands of websites each time the Googlebot crawls the web. Submission to Google is not necessary, since the Googlebot jumps from page to page via hyperlinks, it is more likely that google will find your site this way before being indexed via the URL submission form. Multiple submissions of your website does not increase the chances of being indexed on google.
For a brand new website, without a pagerank and without any links pointing to it, it may take months to be indexed. It is easier to start a reciprocal linking campaign and chances are your website will be picked up much quicker this way.

The process of being indexed on google maybe broadly classified into three stages, the crawling of the webpage, the indexing and finally listings on SERP or Search Engine Results Page. A webpage maybe crawled but it might not be visible in SERP’s for weeks to come.

If your site is not listed in the major directories, then adding it to the directories will have a significant positive impact. If you pay for expedited review of your site at Yahoo, Business.com and others, than you will see improvement the next time Google, update it’s indexes.

In the end, a bottom-to-top rebuild of your website will result in an improvement in your search engine rankings rather quickly. You should continue to see improvements for 6-9 months, as the changes to your site are indexed throughout the databases that drive the major search engines.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

SEO .... It looks like I have already posted here (lol), but you are all over the search engines as I look for Web Promotion Software. If I could get my own pages listed like this, I wouldn't be out looking all over the net for this stuff!