My Site's Listing is Incorrect

When you update information on your site it does not automatically update instantly in Google's index. Rather, Google's index is updated approximately once a month after our robots have crawled more than 8 billion web pages. This process is totally automated, so updated or outdated link submissions are not necessary. Changes to your site's content will be noted by the next crawl. Due to the volume of sites in our index, we cannot manually update pages on an individual basis.

If we continue to list an 'old' version of your site (i.e. we continue to list www.my123site.org despite the fact that your site now lives at www.my456site.org ) you need to update the links that are pointing to the sites. Since our robots jump from page to page via hyperlinks, someone must still be linking to the defunct page. Once others correct their links, we can too. Once your new site is live, you may wish to place a permanent redirect (using a "301" code in HTTP headers) on your old site to inform visitors and search engines that your site has moved.

One way to determine who is linking to the dead site is to try a link search. You can find instructions on how to do this on our features page. Please note that this process does not work for all of the sites in our index.

We cannot manually change your listed address at the exact time you move to your new site. There are steps you can take to make sure that your transition goes smoothly, however. Google listings are based in part on our ability to find your site by following links from other web pages. To preserve your ranking, you will want to inform any sites that currently link to your pages of your change of address. As long as the links change as you move your site over to a new location, your PageRank should not be adversely affected.

If your site goes unlisted for a time, this does not mean you were intentionally dropped from our index. Sometimes in these transitions, we fail to find a site at its new address. Just be sure that others are linking to you and we should pick you up on our next web crawl.

The Google index contains two types of pages--fully indexed and partially indexed pages. Your page is currently partially indexed, which means that although we know about your site, our robots have not read all the content on your page(s) in past crawls. This does not adversely affect your PageRank or your inclusion in our index. It does mean that we don't 'know' what to call your page, so it gets listed with the URL as the title and no description.

We appreciate the frustration this causes webmasters who work hard to make their sites accessible to users. We are working to increase the number of fully indexed pages in our search results to alleviate this problem.

Site descriptions in Google results are actually quoted from the web page in question. Google automatically generates different descriptions based on the search terms used to find the site (these "snippets" display the search term(s) in the context of the page on which they appear).

For example, if there is a pet site that deals with cats and dogs, and someone enters a search for the word 'dog,' the site description on Google will only talk about 'dogs.' If a person searches Google for 'cats' and the same site is delivered as a result, the description will be different – it will contain references to the word 'cat' as it appears on the website.

Google does not display a standard description. We look for the search terms specified (and in some cases, variations of those terms) and show snippets of where those terms appear. This is a completely automated process and editing is not an option. If you alter the relevant text on the page itself, Google will pick up those changes during our next crawl in a few weeks.

Descriptions of sites in the Google Directory are written by volunteers who are part of the Open Directory Project. If you'd like to have your site's description in the directory modified, contact the ODP by going to the category where it is listed, and filling out the "update URL" form.

Google does not manually assign keywords to your site, nor do we manually "boost" the rankings of any site. The ranking process is completely automated and depends on the relative PageRank of each result found.

You can read more about our ranking process elsewhere in this FAQ, but the best way to improve your position in results is to have relevant content and multiple links from other web sites. If there are certain keywords you feel are essential to your site's success, you may want to consider our targeted keyword advertising program. Google does not sell placement in our results, but we do have advertising positions available adjacent to them.

Except in instances involving legal issues or spam, Google's policy for removing a page from our index requires that we obtain the permission of that page's webmaster. This prevents competitors from sabotaging each other's listings. Please have the webmaster for the page in question contact us with proof that he/she is indeed the webmaster. This proof must be in the form of a root level page on the site in question, requesting removal from Google. Once we receive the URL that corresponds with this root level page, we will remove the offending page from our index. For more information on this process, please see http://www.google.com/remove.html.

Google automatically takes a "snapshot" of each page it crawls and caches it. This enables us to show the search terms highlighted on text heavy pages so users can find relevant information quickly, and to retrieve pages for users if the site's server temporarily fails. Users can access the cached version by choosing the "Cached" link on the search results page. If you do not want your content to be accessible through Google's cache, you can use the NOARCHIVE meta-tag. Place this in the <HEAD> section of your documents:

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOARCHIVE">

This tag will tell robots not to archive the page. Google will continue to index and follow links from the page, but will not present cached material to users.

If you want to allow other robots to archive your content, but prevent Google's robots from caching, you can use the following tag:

<META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="NOARCHIVE">

Note that the change will occur the next time Google crawls the page containing the NOARCHIVE tag (typically about once a month). If you want the change to take effect sooner than this, the site owner must contact us and request immediate removal of archived content. Also, the NOARCHIVE directive only controls whether the cached page is shown. To control whether the page is indexed, use the NOINDEX tag; to control whether links are followed, use the NOFOLLOW tag. See the Robots Exclusion page for more information.

Robots.txt is a standard document that can tell Googlebot not to download some or all information from your web server. For information on how to create a robots.txt file, see The Robot Exclusion Standard.

It is a property of the web that many links will be broken or outdated at any given time. Whenever anyone types a link incorrectly that points to your site, or fails to update their pages to reflect changes in your server, Googlebot will try to download an incorrect link from your site. This is also why you may get hits on a machine that is not even a web server.

In order to save bandwidth Googlebot only downloads the robots.txt file once a day or whenever we have fetched many pages from the server. So, it may take a while for Googlebot to learn of any changes that might have been made to your robots.txt file. Also, Googlebot is distributed on several machines. Each of these keeps its own record of your robots.txt file. Finally, you may want to check that your syntax is correct against the standard at: http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/norobots.html. If there still seems to be a problem, please let us know, and we will correct it.

Googlebot was designed to be distributed on several machines to improve performance and scale as the web grows. Also, to cut down on bandwidth usage we run multiple crawlers on machines located near to the sites they are indexing in the network.

Please send an email to googlebot@google.com with the name of your site and a detailed description of the problem. Please also include a portion of the weblog that shows Google accesses, so we can track down the problem more quickly on our end.