Monday, January 5, 2009

Site Indexing: Some Tips and Ideas

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.

Below are few tips, which may help you to get your site indexed faster:

- Site navigation should not take more than 3 clicks from index page to any other;

- Map your site, with the links to every page. Place a link to the map page on your main page;

- Avoid making large pages, the size should not exceed 100 " 200 kB. Robots rarely crawl further than such size.

- It is better to avoid parametrically complicated URLs in your links, such links slow down indexing. Use links which can be easily read by humans.

- Indexing instructions can be made with the aid of robots.txt file, use it.

You can check on progress in indexing of your web site (or new pages) either via direct inquiry to search engine, or using log files of your web host. If you will see a sudden fluctuation in the number of indexed pages, dont be surprised. This happens time to time because of temporary outage of server or some referrers, or, perhaps, because of a change in search engine algorithm.

Good luck on your site indexing!

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