I Just Launched My Site, Why Isn't It In Google?

The Internet often appears to be a magical mix of invisible interactions, and when you plunge your foot in, don't you believe something amazing and unexpected is suppose to happen? So many of our clients believe just this, and the day they launch their site they wonder why they don't appear in Google and throngs of new customers haven't found them.

Google indexes the Internet about once a month. If you have a popular site, it will index you more often, but generally if you're a new site they won't get to you for a while. You can submit a request for indexing to Google, but this won't guarantee they get to you faster. How soon they index you is determined by the popularity of your site and the quality of your page ranking.

To increase the likelihood of your getting indexed faster, invest your energy in getting links from sites that are indexed daily. These would include:

• popular social media sites such as LinkedIn or Digg.
• Adding comments to blogs or other sites is a great way to get links coming into your site. Go to blog aggregators such as Technorati or StumbleUpon and look up the most popular blogs to add comments to. Do not add spam comments, but sincere comments that add value to the blog.
• Also, submitting your site to lesser-known search engines helps you get indesed into Google faster.
• Finally, starting your own blog is a great way to generate links into your site. If you start a blog with Blogger, they are owned by Google and indexed daily.

Create a Custom 404 Error Page
It's worthy to note that sites or pages that have been indexed and are taken down will remain in the Google directory for months until Google comes back around to re-index them and finds them down. Nothing can be done about it. You can tell them to take it down, but doesn’t mean they’ll get to it faster. If you remove pages from your site, it behooves you to create a custom 404 error (page not found error) page which will redirect users to a site map so they can find what they were looking for. Without the 404 error page they will get the standard page from your hosting company that won't even have your site logo on it, let alone the navigation.