How long does it take to get a new site into Google Now?

My new site is still not listed in six months!

[The Toecutter]

I apologize if I am asking something that is common knowledge - I am not an SEO. I did search the archives for this answer but only found information on this topic from 2001 & 2002 and I think things have changed since then.

I know that in years past that we could get a new site listed into Google in about 60 to 90 days. However, I submitted my new 15 page business site into Google last September (6 months ago) and I am still not listed naturally, and consequently I am paying a fortune in AdWords.

Looking through my logs I see that Googlebot has been coming by monthly since November 2004.

QUESTION:
Has the time to become listed naturally in Google gotten significantly longer?

TIA,
John

[George Cooper]

so the sandbox isn't in effect anymore?

My site has been indexed since the beginning of January after launching at the end of December (took about 10 days), but I'm still PR0 and rank poorly for all search terms on Google, whereas I rank very high (#1 on many key terms) on Yahoo and MSN.

[kryton]

Back to the topic, I personally believe there is a still a Google "monthly" update cycle regardless that fresh pages appear in SERPS just after being spidered. It still seems to take about a month to get a site "properly" listed. Six months is well too much time.

[George Cooper]

Hey, you're #13 under "[search phrase]" on MSN. Show a lot of backlinks on there as well. That is not a highly competitive search term so you should be able to get good rankings pretty quickly.

Wow he's on pasge two of MSN! The visitors should really be arriving in their droves now, LOL!

Sorry to spoil your party mate, but this is the Google forum and MSN hardly generates any traffic, even for number one position.

I would disagree with your comments regarding MSN. I rank on page 1 for many relevant terms and I receive almost as many hits from MSN as I do from Yahoo.

[janoss]

Wow, this is a very informative thread. ToeCutters success gives me hope. I just ran my new site through the "Markup Validation Service" and received a page full of errors. I am definitely going to fix these. I have still not been crawled by the infamous GoogleBot. My site is in Yahoo -- not the directories, just the regular search results. I used GoDaddy's TrafficBlazer tool to submit my site, this may have been a waste of money. Not sure yet. My site is 2 months young and uses the Mambo portal with SMF forums. I have the SEO feature turned on to clean up the links.

I would appreciate any insight on improving my site (se my profile) to help make it Search Engine friendly. But first I need to fix the errors.

[janoss]

Steps I have taken to clean up my site and make it Googlebot friendly.

- Ran the W3C Markup Validation Service and fixed the majority of tag related errors. Some of the links with '?' and '&' were too numerous to address now. The majority of other links are SEO.

- Cleaned up up my Description and keyword tags to no be spammy.

- Created an RSS xml news file and registered my site with Pingomatic. Read this tip in this thread.

- I have Google AdSense ads on my pages. Not sure if that helps.

- Installed the Google Toolbar on my Firefox and went to a site that had my link and followed it thorugh. Read here the clicking may be being tracked by Google via the Toolbar plug-in. Not sure. It's a little like voodoo to me.

Well that is it for now. Next month I plan to setup my site via the Google AdWords campaign.

oh, here is my robots.txt file: Is this acceptable for Google?

robots.txt
------
User-agent: Mediapartners-Google*
Disallow: /administrator/
Disallow: /cache/
Disallow: /components/
Disallow: /editor/
Disallow: /help/
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /includes/
Disallow: /language/
Disallow: /mambots/
Disallow: /media/
Disallow: /modules/
Disallow: /installation/
Disallow: /datafeeds/