Google Can’t Find My Site!

You’ve spent all this time creating a beautiful new site and sit back and wait for people to come and visit. But unfortunately they Google you, and it’s your competitor, not you who appears in the search, even when you use your own name! Generally you have to wait a while before Google, or the Googlebot, goes out and collects information about your website and adds it to the Google searchable index.  The way the Googlebot does this is to “crawl” around from website to website and when it finds new or updated information it comes back to Google to report on it. It crawls by using links to and from your site.

If the Google deems the information sent back to be quality content (by what ever means Google has defined quality) it will index that page, and thus recognize it for a later stage when someone is searching for something which Google has recognized on that page.

Whilst this can happen naturally, who wants to wait around for Google to discover your site when you have a whole world out there looking to find you!

There are a number of things you can do right now to get your website crawled and indexed asap.

1. Create a Sitemap

A sitemap is an XML document stored on your website’s server which lists all the pages on your website. It documents all new pages you add to your site and it describes how often to check for changes on specific pages. WordPress has a plugin called Google XML Sitemaps plugin which helps you create a sitemap as well as automatically updates your sitemap for you. You can also use tools such as the XML Sitemaps Generator. Every Wix site has an XML sitemap which is dynamically generated on the WIX server and, therefore, is always up to date with any pages that you add or remove from your site.

 2. Submit Sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools

Take the sitemap you created in step 1 and submit it to Google Webmaster Tools. If you don’t have one, create a free Google Account. From your Google account sign up for Webmaster Tools. Add your new site to Webmaster Tools, then go to Optimization > Sitemaps and add the link to your website’s sitemap to Webmaster Tools to notify Google about it and the pages you have already published.

3. Submit Sitemap to Bing

You can do the same with Bing so that your site will be indexed by Bing as well. Just create an account with Bing and submit your sitemap to them via their Webmaster Tools.

4. Create and Update your Social Media Profiles

By adding your website address to your social media profiles you can creating links to your site. Google crawls via links so the more valid links into your site you have out there the more likely the GoogleBot is to find your site and crawl to it!

5. Install and Setup Google Analytics

Just by creating a Google account which references the website you are alerting Google to the fact that the website exists.