Check Search Engines for Your Site

How do search engines find websites?

Whether your site has been indexed or not is one of the first things to check.

Search engines like Google and Yahoo search the internet constantly for new information on the internet. They make a copy of every page they find which is called an “index”. If search engines don’t find your site, then it can’t be included in their index, and it will not show up on a search results page. Whether your site has been indexed or not is one of the first things to check when you can’t find your website on Google and Yahoo.

Has your site been included in the index?

“site:your-domain.com” shows which pages are being found by search engines.

Try this search in Google: “site:your-domain.com”. The same formula works for Yahoo and MSN. Do you see your site coming up in the results? Check to make sure that not only is your home page coming up for the “site:your-domain.com” search, but also that most of the other web pages in your site are being found.

Unindexed pages will not be listed for searches!

Unindexed pages will not be listed for searches, and that can hurt your site a couple of ways. First off, your site won't be found for the search words on those unindexed pages. Secondly, search engines will under estimate the size of your website. The home page of a five hundred page site has more importance in Google’s hierarchy than the home page of a seven page site. So if your pages aren’t indexed, the whole site is judged less important than it should be by search engines and will come up lower in search results.

Solutions

If your site isn’t coming up well for the “site:your-domain.com” search, your site navigation could be to blame. Some types of navigation can't be detected by search engines, and without navigation search engines won’t find more than your home page. Check to see if your site has good navigation for search engines.

This is why you’ll often see links to the main sections of a website at the bottom of each page. Those links are called the supplemental text navigation. Many web designers add this feature specifically for search engines because text links like these are the easiest type of link for search engines to follow. Here's an example of supplemental text navigation in the footer of a web page. 

A sitemap can also help search engines find the pages within your website. A sitemap is simply a page with text links to all the other pages on your site. If a search engine finds your sitemap it should be able to find every page on your website (though it doesn’t guarantee it will). A sitemap should always be linked from the homepage.

Check Your Site

• Does your site have search engine accessible navigation?
• Is there supplemental text navigation at the bottom of the pages?
• Does your site have a sitemap linked from every page on the site?

If your site passes all three check points above, your site was built with search engines in mind.

Note: You may not need supplemental text or a sitemap if you have a small site with all the pages listed in a text navigation that appears on every page.