Today I am writing a fairly simple tutorial about how you can add your blog or website to Google Search even if you are not ranking high for any keywords or phrases.This tutorial can also be used to check if your site is indexed or not in the Google search.This can be useful to see if there is something wrong with your site, or if your robots.txt file is blocking Google search engine crawlers etc.So let us begin.
Finding your site on Google
A simple process can be employed to check whether your blog is indexed in the Google search or not.All you need to do is go to Google search and do a simple site search.
When you are in the search page, enter this – “site:yourdomain.com”.For example – “site:techgau.org”. Replace techgau.org with your own domain name.If you see any search results then your site has been indexed by Google and hence has been added to the search index.If you do not see your site on Google search, then one of three things might be happening –
- Your site is new, Google has not yet got the time to index your site.
- There is some problem in indexing your site due to a wrongly written robots.txt file.
- Your site has violated Google search engine guidelines and hence has been de-indexed from Google search.
Let us go through all the three possibilities.
Your Site Is New
If your site is new, you need to be patient till Google picks up your blog or website and indexes it.There are a couple of things you can do to speed up this process –
- Try to get backlinks from websites that are already indexed in Google search.Read more about Natural Link Building
- Submit your site to Google.
By doing these two things, you can ensure that your blog or site gets added to the Google search soon.
Problem With Robots.txt File
A robots.txt file is the file which gives instructions to the Google bots about which of your pages are to be crawled and indexed.Usually most blogging platforms come with well written robots.txt file, but if you have tampered with it or if your site does not have a robots.txt file, then do not worry, you can always write one yourself, it is fairly simple if your follow the instructions given here.
Your Site has Violated Google Search Engine Guidelines
In this case, you need to put in some hard work to correct the policy violations that have been committed by your website.Policy violations can be copying others content, serving malware and viruses, selling or buying links etc.These are the sites that have been targeted in the Panda and Penguin algorithm updates.
Usually, even if you correct all the wrongs done by your website, it may take a while for Google to reconsider your blog or website and it may or may not index the site, but almost always try to give webmasters a second chance, if your site is truly changed.
Here is a video by Google employees that talks about how you can go about finding your site on Google.
