Three Ways To Get Listed In Google

by: Michael Wong

In this article I show you three ways to get listed in Google, including one method that is virtually guaranteed to work.

I'm constantly surprised by what I find when dealing with search engine optimization clients.

One of those "surprises" is coming across sites that aren't listed by Google, even though they have been live for many months.

For most Web sites, Google refers more traffic than any other search engine. So it's imperative that your site is indexed in Google.

As of September 24, 2002, Google claims to index Searching 2,469,940,685 web pages. Yet somehow sites still fail to make it into the Google index!

There are three simple methods to getting listed in Google, but only one of these is guaranteed... well almost. ;o)

1. Submit Direct To Google
The first method is to submit your web site via Google's free submit your site form. Just submit your home page and Google's crawler, Googlebot, will crawl the rest.

However, Google do not add all submitted URLs to their index, and there is no guarantee as to when, or if, your site will be indexed.

2. Get Linked From A Site That Google Crawls
The second method is to get a site that Google already crawls to link to your site. So when Google recrawls the web site, it will find the link to your site and crawl and index it as well.

This is Google's preferred method of finding sites to index.

To get another site to link to yours, simply look for a site that links to your competitors and ask them to link to yours. You may have to offer a link back to their site in exchange.

You may like to read my article, "How To Quickly Improve Your Link Popularity." In this article I show you how to find link exchange partners.

3. Submit Your Site To The Yahoo! Directory & The Open Directory Project Index
The third method is to submit your web site to the Yahoo! Directory and/or Open Directory Project index, which is owned by Netscape.

As far as I know, this is the only guaranteed method of getting into the Google index.

Google has agreements with Yahoo! and Netscape to include the sites indexed in their directories in the Google index. So submit your site to either, or both (recommended), of these directories.

For more information, visit Yahoo!'s How to Suggest Your Site page and the Open Directory Project's How to add a site to the Open Directory page.

Once your site is included in either of these directories, it will appear in the Google index in about 4 to 8 weeks.

So now you have no excuse for not getting indexed by Google. ;o)