Are you indexed by Google? Well, JohnnyCoder.com isn’t. Here’s the thing. The URL was submitted a while ago, but it hasn’t made a lick of difference. But I shouldn’t be surprised since Google is very up-front about how they handle submissions.
We add and update new sites to our index each time we crawl the web, and we invite you to submit your URL here. We do not add all submitted URLs to our index, and we cannot make any predictions or guarantees about when or if they will appear.
As you can see, Google doesn’t make any promises.
So, what else can I do? Well, I’ve started sending influential thoughts Google’s way. When I’m feeling particularly positive, I hold my breath and check if my site’s status has mysteriously improved. This is done by executing the following Google site search. Of course, the outcome is always the same:
Your search - site:www.johnnycoder.com - did not match any documents.
Suggestions:
- Make sure all words are spelled correctly.
- Try different keywords.
- Try more general keywords.
And as you can see, along with promises, Google doesn’t make any suggestions. (No helpful ones at least.)
I haven’t given up on Google yet. I’m sure they will start indexing my site when they are good and ready. After all, they are the search kings and they must know what they are doing. In fact, I’m sure it’s not them. It must be me and what I’m not doing. But I really didn’t know what to do so I have started to do some research. I found that most sites provide teasers. It’s helpful information, but not too helpful — if you know what I mean. The sites may say to submit your URL to Google (as I have already done.) Otherwise, their advice is to leave search engine submission and optimization to the experts and purchase their service for only $99 annually.
At least Submitside.com collected search engine “Add URL” and put them all in one place. They also recommend submitting only to the following: Google, Yahoo! and MSN. And only if you are plenty of time should one submit to these smaller engines — Rex, Infotiger, Netsearch Voyager, ExactSeek, LinkCentre, HotRate, TrueSearch, WhatsNu, LookSeek Susy (South Africa), Walhello.com, Dirs.org and Wisenut. They also list a number of engines which one should NOT bother with since many providers actually “power” others and submissions would be redundant.
Most everyone is an agreement. Submitting your site is not enough. Indexing will take up to 8 weeks (if at all) and this alone is not enough to start getting visitors. Being in the top search results depends mostly (but not only) on popularity of your site and a new site is not popular at all. So you need a different strategy.
One approach is to increase the number of links to your site from more popular sites. I suppose this could be done through the use of Technorati or by simply adding comments which link back to your site on other peoples’ blogs. Or by simply begging a popular site owner to add a reference to your site.
Arguably, the best strategy is to “buy” traffic through paid listings. This unique form of search engine advertising means that you can be guaranteed to appear in the top results for the terms you are interested in within a day or less. If you wish to build visibility quickly it is agreed that this is the way to go.
SearchEngineWatch provided a really nice breakdown of this information. They suggest that any site owner established a search engine submission budget. This is true whether you’re running a commercial web site, a hobbyist site in your own time or a site for a nonprofit organization. They suggest you first submit to Yahoo’s human-compiled directory for one year. This is a flat rate of $300 annually. They believe this provides the most bang for your buck merely because this is potentially one of the best links you can gain to influence crawlers. If you need to be listed fast, however, they suggest one use paid placement programs as well. A $50 budget for Overture (which is now Yahoo! Search Marketing) and a $25 budget for Google will last about a month. SearchEngineWatch does claim you can get listed without spending a penny, but if you want to be seen in as many places as possible, as quickly as possible, you will want to use the combination of submissions which they outlined above.
So far only about half of the articles I’ve read are even interesting, but I have learned the difference between directories (like Yahoo!) and crawlers (like Google, Ask and MSN.) And I’ve learned about paid listings like Overture and Google AdWords and I have learned a bit about how search engines work when it comes to page rankings and who feeds who. I’m learning, but not even dangerous yet. Unless someone has an extra $375 to fund my search engine submission budget?