Wednesday, January 7, 2009

Web Site Indexing: Some Tips

By Irmin J. Roybal

Site indexing is a necessary procedure performed by search engines in order to rate and list your site in search results. It is hard to underestimate the importance of timely and complete indexing of your site for your web business: your site (or any addition to your site) will not show-up in search results, until it is indexed.

Site Indexing happens either as a result of direct submission of your site to a search engine, or as a result of a visiting by search engine robot. It is not a bad idea to submit your site to search engines, however, a random visit of a robot from particular search engine can serve your site even better. Robot, coming to your site from a link of another web site will more likely rate your site higher in the hierarchy of a given search engine. No matter what kind of algorithm is used, if you site has an in-link, it means that your site is useful.

The terms of site indexing vary from couple days to a month(s). It is a proven fact that having several links from sites with high PR substantially accelerate indexing. The fastest indexer on the web today is Google.

Indexing of newly added pages happens faster, if the site having a frequent updates. In such case engines may consider such fast growing/updating sites up-to-date and useful for users, and hence, assign them some priority on indexing.

Here are some tips, which can help to get faster indexing to your site:

- Any page of your site shall not be more than three clicks away from the main page;

- Build a map of your site, link your front page to that map;

- Try not to make pages larger than 200 kB: crawlers rarely go deeper than that size.

- Try to use human-friendly URLs in your links, too parametrically complicated links make the indexing harder;

- Use robots.txt file in order to pass indexing instructions to the robot.

The progress in indexing of your web site can be checked in logs of your site host or by direct inquiry to search engines. Dont be surprised by fluctuations in number of indexed pages in your site: this can happen for several reasons: server or referrers could be down, or, perhaps, search engine changed its algorithm.

Have a great indexing!

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