Why Google Doesn't Like Your Site
Every once in a while I get a question from one of my readers asking why their site's not showing up in Google's results. Take the Lucid Blog, for example, a blog that publishes the occasional article like How To Remember Your Dreams and How To Know If You're Dreaming. What can the blogger do to get those articles into Google's results?
Let's get something straight first, though. There's a difference between Google knowing about your site and — dare I say it? — Google caring about your site.
Getting Google to know about your site is easy. Any or all of these methods will work:
- A link to your site from a site Google already knows about and crawls on a regular basis. Blog are really good for this — see The Feeder Blog.
- Submitting the site directly to Google. Often maligned, but it still works.
- Registering your site with Google's Webmaster tools. You don't even have to submit a sitemap, though that helps.
How can you tell that Google knows about your site? The best way is by checking your web server's access logs to see if the Googlebot (Google's main crawler) has been by. Another way to tell is by using one of the many PageRank checkers to see if any of the pages on your site have a PR value — if they do, you can be sure Google knows about your site.
So that covers Google knowing about your site. But it may not care about your site. Which is why using the “site:” syntax in a query may return no results.
To get Google to care about your site, your site must:
- Be a trusted site, or
- Get enough unadultered links from trusted sites to become a trusted site yourself
If that sounds like an incestuous cycle, it is. Computer science types call this a “recursive” algorithm.
When I say “unadulterated” link, I refer to a link that doesn't have a “nofollow” attribute. As you probably know by now, a “nofollow” link is a link that doesn't “vote” for the site it's pointing to. It's the Pontius Pilate of links.
This is why link building is always important. The number of links you need to get varies. Google tends to favor domains that have been in existence longer, so if you have an old domain it'll take fewer links to get Google to care about it. The trustworthiness of the sites giving the links come into play as well. As does the theme of the site, and how relevant the links are.
So if your site's not showing up in Google's results, try to get some higher-quality, unadulterated links from other sites. This isn't always easy, but one way that often works is to submit high-quality articles to some of the bigger article directories, with on-topic links back to your site in the article resources boxes. Anyone can do that kind of link building.
Things get easier once you have one site that Google cares about. All of a sudden it's easier to get Google to care about your other sites, because of course you can link to them from the trusted site. As long as you don't abuse that trust, of course.
So work hard on getting trust for one site. The others will follow.
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