One of the most popular problems among webmasters is not being able to get indexed by Google despite search engine submissions and long waiting. Google takes time to index some new sites and this can be frustrating. But most of the times, the reasons for Google not indexing your site is from your side, although not many people realize it, and hence to frequent complaint. So if you have a new website and is awaiting indexing by Google, here are a few things that you might want to consider in the first place.
Well technically they shouldn’t but some CMS’s like WordPress has a default option which will be checked already where it will block all search engines from crawling the website. This is to make sure that your website is not indexed while you are only setting up the site. But when you forget to uncheck this option, the CMS adds a Nofollow meta tag to the pages whereby search engines will not crawl the site.
Robots.txt files are used to control (not fully though) search engines crawling the website. Make sure you have not blocked bots from crawling parts of your website.
Use tools like header checker tools to ensure that your server is returning a healthy 200 OK status. Anything else should be dealt with immediately.
Sitemaps does not guarantee that your site will be up on the SERPs soon, but they are a necessity. They ensure that we have a route map for the bots to follow. So set up a sitemap before even trying to get indexed.
Setting plugins like SEO plugins are good. But make sure they are set properly. Some plugins have an option to set nofollow meta tags on pages by default to avoid duplicate content issues, if you do not turn this off, it might screw up the indexing process.
I assume that you have done all the basic steps to invite search engines to your site already. Which are -
1 – To submit the website URL to Google via the submission tool.
2 – If possible, get a relevant contextual link from a good website (which has already been indexed and has good reputation).
Summary
Generally Google takes its own time to index new websites, and the best way to make sure Google indexes your site is to get a very relevant text link from a reputed site, but it isn’t easy always. But however, remember to have the basics health check done, so that when the bots are here, you have everything in place.
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Good Post Mani,
here I would like to add one more thing in your list.
This is “Duplicate content”. Your new site is also not indexed in Google if you copy the contents from another sites.
I have got some clients and they had No-Indexing problem and the reason was Duplicate Contents.
Thanks Again for Wonderful Post.
Ankit
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Absolutely awesome to see such good quality information on how to get a website indexed on google.
You are offering true value and many will be thanking you.
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Great article!
When I start a new webpage, and want google to index it as fast as poosible, I always write some blog articles and link to the page. Google like blogs very much
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my new site student-jobs.co.in is not yet indexed.
i havd followed all the things you mentioned here.
hope my site gets indexed soon
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chakkravarthi
Replied:
you need to build some links too, otherwise it takes a little more time for Google to find your site.
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This information is very important for people who are submitting a site for the first time.
But be advised, it takes time. Your own site isn’t the only one being submitted.
From my experience, I can tell that it can take up to 1 month before you start seeing anything.
But I do admit that using Google Webmaster Tools and a site map helps a lot. Even if the site map doesn’t contain all the links, if you have a good link structure (or perhaps a not so good one), in time Google will index all your pages.
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It does take ages to get a new site listed in Google – but older sites do seem to get indexed more quickly. It’s easy to say, but just keep adding the content, and it will happen, eventually!
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