Why doesn’t my website show up in Google?

A common question we hear from people with brand new websites is, “Why can’t I find my website in Google?”

Short answer:  Google hasn’t indexed it yet.  And this is a process that can take anywhere from a few days, to a couple of weeks.

But, like me, I can hear most of you scratching your heads and wondering:  “What the hell is ‘indexing’?”

Basically, Google has a Googlebot, which is their very clever web crawling robot.  Googlebot continuously crawls through the internet and retrieves new pages and passes them to the Google Indexer.  The Indexer then has to sort through every word on the page of a site, and stores those words in a huge database.  When someone submits a search/query via Google, the indexer uses that database to pull its results. This process can take a long time as first the Googlebot needs to find your new website and then has to analyse it.

To encourage indexing to happen as quickly as possible, we submit all new websites that we create via Google’s ‘addURL’ form.  However there is no guarantee that this will speed the process up, as there is literally tens of thousands of users doing this every day.

One thing that will definitely speed the indexing process up is getting relevant and trusted backlinks to your website.  These backlinks could come from relevant industry bodies, from your suppliers, or even from local directory listings such as Hotfrog and StartLocal.

Alternatively website owners can submit what is called an XML sitemap of their site to the search engines that tells the Googlebot and other crawlers to check every single page of your site. An XML sitemap is a type of file or “feed” that can be automatically generated using websites such as http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ and others.

I hope this helps you with you search engine success!