If you’ve ever launched a new site, you know how hard it is to get more than a few pages indexed in a relatively short time. I was able to get a new site launched and had Google showing over 350 pages of my site in 15 days (using the “site:” operator). Want to know how I was able to get this site indexed and all of those pages cached in about two weeks? Here are the things that I consider crucial to getting indexed quickly.
1. Blog format sites. Say what you want about a blog, but using a blog (like WordPress) as a CMS can’t be beat. The nature of the site, including the architecture, is perfectly designed for quick and deep indexing. Using the Google XML sitemap plugin is crucial for getting the deepest pages found by Google. I always tell Google not to index tag and category pages.
2. Pages linking to pages. You want to make sure that each of your pages link to at least a couple other pages deep in your site. This internal linking structure makes sure you don’t end up with abandoned pages (“island pages”) that don’t have incoming links from within your site. Blogs do this natively with the “Next Post” type links. Another easy way to do this is with a “Related Posts” plugin. It will take keywords and show other posts that use a similar set of keywords.
3. A few strong links. The easiest way to grab a few high quality links from directories. My favorites are DMOZ, Ezilon Web Directory, and Yahoo! Directory (if you can afford Yahoo!). Just a few strong links is all that it takes to get Google crawling a new site.
4. Buy an old domain. The site that I mentioned (with over 350 indexed and cached pages) was a 4 year old domain that was in the expiring auctions at GoDaddy. It had a few incoming links (about 10) so I just added a couple of strong links (see #3) and let Google do the rest.
5. Scheduled posts. If you have a lot of pages of content, it is best to drip them into your site over a month. If you don’t have time to wait, I would at least try to schedule your system to publish 1-3 pages per day. This gives Google a chance to index from the root of your site instead of having to dig for the pages. Obviously to get 350 pages indexed in 15 days, I didn’t do that, but it’s always a good idea. I posted about 50 pages per day for about a week.
6. Avoid outbound links. If you can, at least in the beginning, avoid having any outgoing links from your site. This keeps Google bot running through your site without giving an easy exit. This one is purely speculation and can’t really be proven.
7. Put Adsense on every page. Even if you don’t plan to monetize your website with Adsense, it’s good to use to let Google know where your pages are. When Adsense is on a page, and you call that page from a browser, your Adsense ad has to go back to Google to serve relevant ads. This means your page is read and keywords sent back to Google to analyze which ad to show. While some people think that the Adsense bot is totally unrelated to the search engine bot, I disagree. It is in Google’s best interest to find as many pages as possible in any way they can.
8. Keep posting. Give those bots a reason to come back. The best reason to come back is to index new content. If you’re always posting new content (1-3 times per day), you’re giving search engine bots a reason to keep coming back to your site.
There you have it, those are the steps that I generally take when I’m trying to get a new site indexed. Do you have something you do in addition? Disagree? Let me hear it in the comments!
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