GoogleBot came, saw... and left!

How does the indexing actually work?

[Lupi]

Hi,

I have a pretty new site, but thanks to some links it has already been visited by GoogleBot and MSNBot.

GoogleBot has visited the site (which is only 1 week old) 8 times according to the log files, but only has the first page (homepage) indexed. It does not show any links to my site. The MSNBot has visited the site 3 times, also indexed no more than the first page, but shows 9 links at least.

Now I'm wondering how GoogleBot could actually find and index the first page, if it does not list any links? Also, why does it come 8 times and never indexes the rest of the site (clean HTML + CSS, some newbie SEO)? I suppose I don't necessarily need links to every single page, but would it speed up the process?

- Lupi

[specter]

Hi,

Your problem is very common:You have to review your internal links.
Make sure that you can reach each page from the Home page and back again with TEXTUAL links that the spiders recognize more easily.
Or at least that the ALT attribute of the images of each page contains some text.

In this moment Google "visit" only your home because probably you've submitted your url to it.

If you don't modify your links you cannot speed up any process.

[mack]

Because your site is very new this if fairly normal. What you will find is that over the coming weeks your pages will start to fall into the index, then as Googlebot returns, it will start to dig deeper into your site.

Mack.

[whoisgregg]

So long as the

<a href="">

and

</a>

tags are properly formed it doesn't make any difference if it's text in between or an <img /> tag as far as spidering/indexing is concerned. Now ranking is affected by anchor text (what's in-between the tags) but you seem more concerned about the pages appearing at all. It sounds like you already know about doing "site:" and "link:" searches.

Google does not list all backlinks, only those that meet some unpublished criteria so you can't depend on seeing every backlink. If you've not submitted the site to Google, it's possible that Google already knows about the domain name from a previous owner, used WHOIS information to "discover" the site, or maybe you've got the toolbar installed and Google used that info to find it.

As far as speeding up the process, the best way to make Google visit more often is for Google to think your site is important. The best way to do that is to get plenty of quality, inbound links from other sites.

[808image]

I just mentioned this on another post. Try using high traffic sites like backpage.com and craigslist. Make sure that the link to your site is active, and use your keywords for your headline. I'm doing it and googlebot, msnbot, and Inktomi are all visiting on a daily bases. Also, can't stress this enough. Make sure your meta tags are optimized with keywords, description, title.