“We Can Get You In Google’s Index Within Minutes!”

Being indexed does not equal being ranked.

If you attended our SEO Webinar last week, you might remember that indexing is a topic that I touched on rather obliquely near the end of the Q+A, and one that Alicia spoke about near the beginning, as well. Some of my weekend reading got the thought stuck in my head, and I thought I’d offer up a more comprehensive breakdown.

If your rankings aren’t impressing or even appearing and you’re worried about being penalized or blacklisted, the first best thing you can do is use a simple search operator: go to Google and do a search for site:yourdomain.com. The results will only show pages from your website that are in the search engine’s index.

There’s a problem if:

1. There are no results

2. Only your homepage is listed in the results

3. You have a huge site with hundreds or thousands of pages, but most of them aren’t indexed.

And the problem is usually technical (architecture changes with no redirects, bad internal linking, noindex tags on pages that shouldn’t have them, etc.) but might be due to a penalty. Check Google Webmaster Tools to see if that’s the case.

But how do you get indexed in the first place, and what does that mean?

Googlebot finds your site, either through a link to it from an external source or by entering your site into its site submission form at http://google.com/addurl and the sends the Googlebot to visit your site. It can do this a number of times per month and will eventually settle into a rhythm based on how frequently you update your site. If you have a blog, most blog content management systems will ping the search engines when you publish a new post, which is one of the reasons why blogs tend to get indexed within hours or minutes of publishing.

But being indexed doesn’t always equal being ranked – that comes down to good on- and off-page SEO and solid keyword research to help you target the terms that your customers are searching for.