Affiliate Classroom Blog

5 Things I’ve Learned about Indexing

Tuesday, May 22nd, 2007 at 6:15 pm by Kathy Jackson

I really like to do things the easy way. Unfortunately the easy way usually turns out to be either the hard way, or the way that won’t work. I admit that I have tried some shady “get indexed in 24 hours”methods, but most of them don’t work!

I have learned that if you really want to get indexed and STAY indexed, patience is a virtue and planning is essential.

Here are five things that I have learned about getting indexed:

1. Money won’t get you indexed faster. Throwing money at a problem rarely works and getting indexed isn’t an exception. Buying links or even purchasing entire high PageRank sites is no guarantee.

In fact, when a new site comes online with hundreds of back links, it raises red flags. No search engine believes that a new site can come online with a hundred sites already linking to it so not only is throwing money out there to get indexed not helpful, it might even slow the process down.

2. Plan ahead. Getting a domain and instantly going live is a big mistake. You need to plan ahead. Actually, registering your domain name a full four months before you launch the site is a really good idea.

It’s also a good idea to know the history of the domain name that you buy. Google has a long memory. Domain names can be blocked for a lot of reasons. Check out the history of the domain name that you are considering before you buy. You can check the history of domain names with Domain Tools or Way Back Machine .

3. Blog and Ping but use your head. Blogging and pinging can get you indexed faster, but do it responsibly. Overdoing the pinging can raise red flags and get you banned from ping servers.

Natural linking is always best. Contact a blogger who is active in a related niche and get a link in one of their blog posts. This is even better than links from your own blogs you’ll get real, targeted traffic. Blogmasters are often more open to giving or trading links than you might imagine.

4. If the niche is small, keep your site small. By small I mean 200 pages or less. Now some affiliates would disagree, but I side with the theory that smaller sites get indexed faster and easier than mega sites.

5. Check, double check and triple check. Make certain that your HTML is clean and watch your logs to see what happens when the spiders crawl your pages. If they never get past your home page you need to add the tag, to the HEAD in the HTML of all your other pages. And don’t forget keywords in your page title tags, using keywords in tags, and all the other basics of good on page SEO.

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