How to Get Your Site Indexed In Google & Other Search Engines, Quickly (I Hope)
I have been helping a number of sites with brand new domains lately. Before I take the job I usually caveat it with the old “if you don’t get links it ain’t going to work” mantra, but often the audacity of hope overpowers the reality of Google.
I have been having some issues with one site in particular – the site had no problem getting indexed, but Google will only index a relatively small amount of the site’s pages. I pinged a number of very skilled SEOs to ask if they had any ideas beyond “get links”. I was surprised at how many of them did not have anything to add (or else did not want to reveal their tricks).
To underscore the importance of getting links, I had three different clients launch new domains of similar scale. Two of them got a lot of links when they launched – one via appearing on some top morning radio shows and getting links from their sites and both getting promoted in all of the tech pr sites like TechCrunch, VentureBeat, etc. The radio show guys got I think about 4,000 search engine referrals on day one and now a year later are doing about 3,000,000 visits/mnth. The other got 300K referrals in the first month. The third site attempted to get links by doing manual linkbuilding and they are limping along at very low traffic, even though their site has killer on-page optimization, if I do say so myself.
While there is indeed no substitute for getting links, here are a number of to-do’s that I have picked up over the years that can make a difference, in no particular order:
1. Navigate to the page with a Google toolbar enabled browser.
2. Email the site to a friend using gmail.
3. Mention the url using the http protocol and www on message boards w/o a link (http://www.blah.com/). Try not to be spammy.
4. Perform site: and link: requests to each of the engines but especially msft and yahoo.
5. Navigate to the site on any of the cheap internet connections including comcast, aol, time warner, + brighthouse, netzero, etc… as those logs are used to find new sites.
6. Make toolbar requests to compete.com , alexa.com & quantcast.com.
7. Fetch site profile data from API’s (site:, link:, inurl:) google,, yahoo and alexa.
8. Navigate to the site profile page on aboutus.org (and/or create a profile page there)
9. Create a wikipedia entry for the site.
10. Do a site profile search in each of the various Yahoo and Google search services (local, images, news, video, youtube, blogs)
11. Search technorati, icerocket, blogpulse for the site.
12. Submit (aka buy links to) your top pages on well-indexed directories such as Yahoo Directory and Best of the Web.
13. Get links from bloggers who typically write about competitive sites:
14. Issue press releases via major press release distribution services (PRNewswire, PRWeb, etc.)
15. Submit links to top 50 pages from as many social bookmarking sites as possible:
a. http://www.ebizmba.com/articles/social-bookmarking
b. http://www.blogmarketingtactics.com/social-bookmarking/social-bookmarking-top-links.html
c. http://www.searchenginejournal.com/125-social-bookmarking-sites-importance-of-user-generated-tags-votes-and-links/6066/
16. Buy some Google Ads to your pages (this forces Google to crawl these pages to assess your quality score)
17. Make the top 50 pages the priority on your xml sitemap. Maybe make these and the home page the only pages in your xml sitemap.
18. If your site has pages with generic data that is common to other sites (e.g. business contact info), then you should figure out ways to add unique text to each page such as a new review of the business.
18. Oh yeah and submit your domains to all of the search engines via their submit URL pages:
Anyone else have any other tips?
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