Ensuring The Search Engines Can Read And Index Your Site

You've put up a great looking site, researched your keywords, written great content, but its four months later and you still can't find your site for any of the keywords you were hoping to target!!

Something is wrong, but what? A major cause of a site not showing up in the search results is that the site is not being indexed.

One of the best ways to check if your site is being indexed fully is by running the command 'site: www.mysite.com' in Google (it also works in Yahoo!). The search engine will return a listing of all the pages it has indexed of your site.

Issues to look out for:

No pages indexed

If no pages are showing your site is either brand new, has no in-bound links, or your site is banned. The first two issues can be resolved easily. The latter is pretty permanent and you may want to consider acquiring another site name.

Only one page indexed.

If only one page is showing you need to check that you have more than one page in your site. This may sounds strange. However, if you have a site built in Macromedia Flash the whole site may appear to the visitor to be dozens of pages long, but to the search engines it appears to be only one page. In this instance you will need to create a second version of your site in HTML or rely on Pay per Click advertising.

Framed sites are known to cause problems too. Google and the other major spiders can generally handle frames OK, but some spiders have issues and so frames should be avoided.

Some pages showing are labeled 'supplemental results'

If your pages are showing up as 'supplemental results' it means they are not in the main Google index. Instead they have found your pages through another means.

Example Google Supplemental Result Screen shot

(Note site name blurred to spare the site owner)

If your site is new this may be OK. After a few months you shouldn't have any pages labeled supplemental. This is usually caused by a lack of quality links to the site.

Most of your site site is showing, but some key pages are missing

Javascript menu bars and popups while providing great user functionality are not search engine friendly. Spiders do not run javascript and so cannot access these pages. Note that javascript button rollovers are OK because they use the page URL in the <a href> tag.

Dynamic sites may not always be indexed correctly. Dynamic sites have pages built instantly by server side programming and usually contain '?' and '&'s in the URL. If this is the case static versions of the main pages may be necessary.

Next article will detail what you can do to ensure your whole site is indexed.

Next Article: Ensuring The Search Engines Can Read And Index Your Site - Part 2

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