It isn’t whether any search engine has found the site or not, but simply that site:www.floorco.co.uk in google shows no documents online.
If Google doesn’t know about your site (which it doesn’t) then it can’t show any documents. A common misconception is that Google knows about everything on the web, it doesn’t and can’t - there are lots of sites/pages on the web that are simply inaccessible unless it knows an address for them.
I assume the other sites you made had links to them from somewhere else so Google managed to find it. If there are no links to the site from other sites (there are now, Keith posted one that will get indexed before long) that Google does know about then you will need to manually add it to Google (see Tim’s post).
Hope this helps,
Joe
Hi Joe,
Thanks for your input. I am learning a lot from this, but surely it is very, very, very unusual for Google not to find anything whatsoever on a site to index - especially given the subject matter in this case?
We set up another site a couple of years ago which, using the link:http://www search method described earlier indicates no link backs either, but Google likes that site.
I know I am guilty of not doing more to get the site seen in terms of registering manually with search engines, but I really didn’t think it would be this bad!
Thanks for your input. I am learning a lot from this, but surely it is very, very, very unusual for Google not to find anything whatsoever on a site to index - especially given the subject matter in this case?
We set up another site a couple of years ago which, using the link:http://www search method described earlier indicates no link backs either, but Google likes that site.
I know I am guilty of not doing more to get the site seen in terms of registering manually with search engines, but I really didn’t think it would be this bad!
There are no hard and fast rules when it comes to search engines, due to the number of factors involved some things will produce certain results while the same thing done somewhere else can return others. The best way to see that Google knows about your site is to let them know about it manually, but even that doesn’t guarantee results
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.
Also, the inbound link checking that Google provides is terrible - it can take months for some links to appear as inbound and others just don’t appear at all.
Sometime around 18/1/10 (at 11:54 -0500) Robert B said:
How do you actually GET inbound links?
As well as getting others to make links you can blog, tweet, set up
portfolio pages on your own site that link to it, post comments in
relevant forums and blog comments that point at the site…
As you should be able to imagine, this sort of thing must be done very carefully. In particular, DON’T spam forums or comment areas
in blogs. Keep it relevant and non-sneaky.
It is now just about a week since I generated a sitemap.xml file and submitted it to google, and still nothing is being listed. Google has acknowledged that the sitemap.xml file is good, and reports no errors, and shows that there are 12 URLs, but that none have been indexed.
I recently needed to submit a site map for an osCommerce site, and within 24 hours that file was seen and indexed by Google. As part of that process, I created and uploaded a robots.txt file. This file contained:
Sitemap: http://www.website.co.uk/xml_index.php. I know that this isn’t strictly an .xml file, but there were some other files as part of an installation which generates the .xml files automatically.
I notice in my dashboard for the site I can’t get indexed that there is a reference to a robots.txt file, which I haven’t uploaded. Is it worth generating a robots.txt file for this site, and uploading that, but just wording it Sitemap: Havwoods UK | Experts in Engineered and Solid Wood Flooring & Cladding
It’s a slow process unfortunately. They usually do an index a month, normally at the end of the month and say that you should leave between 2 weeks and month for the changes to take place which means best case you have another week to go, worst case 3 weeks.
Joe
On 26 Jan 2010, at 12:37, Jonathan Riddle wrote:
Hi all,
It is now just about a week since I generated a sitemap.xml file and submitted it to google, and still nothing is being listed. Google has acknowledged that the sitemap.xml file is good, and reports no errors, and shows that there are 12 URLs, but that none have been indexed.
I recently needed to submit a site map for an osCommerce site, and within 24 hours that file was seen and indexed by Google. As part of that process, I created and uploaded a robots.txt file. This file contained:
Sitemap: http://www.website.co.uk/xml_index.php. I know that this isn’t strictly an .xml file, but there were some other files as part of an installation which generates the .xml files automatically.
I notice in my dashboard for the site I can’t get indexed that there is a reference to a robots.txt file, which I haven’t uploaded. Is it worth generating a robots.txt file for this site, and uploading that, but just wording it Sitemap: Havwoods UK Premium Wood Floor Supplier & Cladding Solutions
I do honestly appreciate SEO results are sloooow, but Google has approved and OK’d the submitted sitemap, but will not list the included URLs in that sitemap in my dashboard, stating the site can’t be indexed, which is different to nothing showing in physical google searches.
The good news is that the site is now being seen by Google and other search engines, so thanks for the assistance on this.
The bad news is, this thread is being picked up in the search results and my concern is that my client (or customers) will see what has been said here!
Can anything be edited or is that just the way it is?
It would seem to be a good time to remind everyone of two things:
This is a mailing list, first and foremost, with a Web archive. You cannot edit an e-mail once you have sent it.
The Web archive of this list was designed to present a very good face to Google and to promote Freeway-centric answers within generic Google searches. Among other design intents (and fairly well down on the list), it’s a marketing tool for Freeway, and it’s engineered to succeed at that.
Posting links on this list is a very good way to get some traffic through Google for whatever you link up. Another is the amazingly-well-crawled Softpress Gallery: http://www.softpress.com/galleries/
If you need to show the list an example of something gone horribly wrong, it’s a good idea to use a development server under your own domain (or an alias) if you’re worried about your client seeing it.
For general example code used in explanations, the Internet Society provides a set of domain names: http://example.orghttp://example.nethttp://example.com which are the canonical domains to use when writing out an example of an address that you don’t expect anyone to actually follow.
For a question like the one that started this thread, I doubt very seriously that anyone at your client’s office will be bothered by the fact that you care about your work enough to check up on Google – that’s a benefit of working with you!