Being INDEXED in Google

Google is basically a database of web pages and when somebody performs a search on Google it checks its database to bring back pages that are relevant to the search term. If your site is not in the database it cannot appear in the search results. Being in the Google database is known as being indexed and all it means is that Google knows of the existence of the url.

In the bad old days you would have to go to Google’s submission form to tell them about your new site or page but because of the speed and frequency at which Google spiders the web looking for content this is no longer necessary. A quick way to get into the Google index is to get a link back from another page that is already in the index and is updated regularly. A great way to do this is to bookmark your new site / page at one of the top social bookmarking sites or a big web 2.0 site such as Squidoo.

To check if your site is indexed, perform the following search in Google:

site:domain

eg, typing in site:http://www.clarencewang.com will bring back all the pages from my domain that Google has in its index.

Being RANKED in Google

People often confused being indexed with being ranked. Being indexed merely means that your site is in the database, it does not mean that it will come up when somebody types in a related search term. For example, type in site:http://www.johnchow.com and this will show that Google has many pages from johnchow.com in its index. However now type in simply john chow and note that johnchow.com does NOT come near the top of the results!

I’ll explain why that is later in the article but be aware of the difference.

A ranking in Google is a relationship between a particular search term and a page. So for example, my Twitter Guide ranks number #1 in Google for the term twitter guide. However that page does not rank number #1 for the term random search term. A page can rank for many different terms but often it is difficult to rank in the top position for multiple phrases on the same page. We usually optimise a page for one particular search term.

The Google SANDBOX

The Google Sandbox is a mythical beast! That doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist; simply that it is not official but there is much evidence of it. The general theory is that Google does not trust brand new domains so it tends to put them in the ’sandbox’ for a period of a few months while some kind of authority is established. When a site is in the sandbox it is still indexed, but it tends not to rank as well as it could do for competitive keywords. Quite often, a sandboxed site can still rank number #1 for low competition keywords.

The period of time that a site spends in the sandbox varies, but is typically 3-6 months. It tends not to be ‘released’ until some time has passed and Google is satisfied that the site has some authority so it will need to have some good, relevant keywords and some backlinks. Also note that not all sites go into the sandbox.

What quite often happens is that when a site is first indexed it ranks quite highly for its target keywords but then it appears to drop out of the index altogether only to appear a few days later but ranking much lower. This is perfectly normal behaviour for Google and nothing to be worried about.

Google PageRank

PageRank is an indicator that Google put in place many years ago and has caused an enormous amount of discussion and debate in the SEO community. Although it is called Pagerank, it does not really indicate where a page will rank in the search engine results pages (serps). It is an indicator of the number and quality of backlinks that a particular page has.

Many people put a lot of emphasis on building PageRank but the thing to remember is that it is just an indicator, nothing more. PageRank is only one is a great many factors that determine your ranking in the serps and it does not do anything to directly drive traffic. Your most important stat as far as SEO goes is your actual traffic which you can see from your own analytics software.

However, it does have a use - it gives other people an indicator of the ranking of your page and this can come in useful if you want to trade links with people, sell advertising space, sell the domain and so on.

Alexa Ranking

Alexa is an independent company that has nothing whatsoever to do with Google. It publishes a toolbar that tracks usage statistics from its users and from those statistics Alexa publishes ‘traffic’ rankings of websites that its users visit using the toolbar. The trouble with Alexa is that it only tracks traffic from people using the Alexa toolbar which is not everybody so it is not an accurate traffic indicator.

It is about as useful as PageRank - you are better off looking at your own analytics to see your own traffic stats but your alexa ranking can be useful as an indicator for other people if you want to sell ad space etc. Just remember that Alexa is not Google.

Google SLAP

This is another term that has evolved over the years which has much supporting evidence but no official word from Google. It simply means that for some reason, a particular domain has suffered some kind of ranking penalty and is not ranking as highly as it should. The domain johnchow.com has been Google-slapped for quite some time now which is why it is not ranking well for the term john chow, which it certainly should.

These slaps happen periodically and are not random. Another example was Squidoo which was slapped some time in 2007 I think when it got severely hit by spammers. However the guys at Squidoo worked hard to clean up the spam and pages from its domain are now ranking much better. The slap appears to have been lifted, or at least lessened.

In a similar way, there are some domains that seem to be extremely well liked by Google and tend to rank extremely highly. Wikipedia and YouTube are two such examples. You’ll have a hard time outranking a page from those domains! What this means is that Google is able to apply some kind of additional factor to specific domains as it feels like it which affects the rankings. Play nice with Google and this shouldn’t be a problem for you.

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