Ok, that was a bit of a bummer title. It doesnt matter if the search engines dont think much of your page as long as your site is well presented and user friendly. For instance, a site that is made up of mostly images (search engines cant read images) wont interest the search engines that much, whereas the same site could be very popular with humans. However, what if your site has never been found by the search engines and the site has been uploaded for quite some time now? Well, maybe it's time to start addressing that.
First of all, we need to find out if the search engines know about us. I keep saying search engines (plural) but I mean just Google for this little test. Ok, let's do it.
1, Open a new page in your browser at www.google.com
2, Type into the search box 'link' ':' and then 'www.yourdomain.com' like so, lets use the Google site itself in this example link:www.google.com When you've typed it in, hit the search button. You'll see at the top of the results page, that Google has over 2.5 million links pointing at it.
3, Now try it for your own site. I've tried it myself for a few sites here and I've found some very interesting results. When I entered www.harmonyinBeauty.co.uk and www.marcobenito.com into the search box, Google tells me that Lucy has 3 links pointing to her site, and Marco benito has one. In both instances, those links came from Liberty Nail Design but not from our links page, no, they came from our guests gallery page. This is not a ploy to get you to send some pics my way, but if you type in your domain name and Google shows no links for you, I know what I would be doing. *S*
Anyway, I digress. Some of you will enter your details into Google and get results back saying that you have only 1 or 2 links, The Geek site itself shows just 5 links when we all know that there are much much more than that. Why does that happen? It's all to do with how Google works out the link system based on pagerank (A measure of how good Google believes a website to be). I'll cover this in detail some other day, suffice it to say that the less page rank your site possesses, the less important your links are to Google.)
What if, you own the site www.myniftynails.com, you type in your details, and Google tells you:
'Your search - link:www.myniftynails.com - did not match any documents.'
What's wrong? Well, nothing is actually wrong, Google is just telling you that it isn't aware of your site. You need to submit your site to Google in order for it to be spidered. You can do this for free at http://www.google.com/addurl.html You only need to do this once, and you only need to enter your main url. If you submit a site repeatedly, you risk getting it banned. You also need to improve your linking strategy. You can read some suggestions in the thread of the same name in 'chit-chat'. If your site falls into this category, I'd recommend doing this stuff today.
First of all, we need to find out if the search engines know about us. I keep saying search engines (plural) but I mean just Google for this little test. Ok, let's do it.
1, Open a new page in your browser at www.google.com
2, Type into the search box 'link' ':' and then 'www.yourdomain.com' like so, lets use the Google site itself in this example link:www.google.com When you've typed it in, hit the search button. You'll see at the top of the results page, that Google has over 2.5 million links pointing at it.
3, Now try it for your own site. I've tried it myself for a few sites here and I've found some very interesting results. When I entered www.harmonyinBeauty.co.uk and www.marcobenito.com into the search box, Google tells me that Lucy has 3 links pointing to her site, and Marco benito has one. In both instances, those links came from Liberty Nail Design but not from our links page, no, they came from our guests gallery page. This is not a ploy to get you to send some pics my way, but if you type in your domain name and Google shows no links for you, I know what I would be doing. *S*
Anyway, I digress. Some of you will enter your details into Google and get results back saying that you have only 1 or 2 links, The Geek site itself shows just 5 links when we all know that there are much much more than that. Why does that happen? It's all to do with how Google works out the link system based on pagerank (A measure of how good Google believes a website to be). I'll cover this in detail some other day, suffice it to say that the less page rank your site possesses, the less important your links are to Google.)
What if, you own the site www.myniftynails.com, you type in your details, and Google tells you:
'Your search - link:www.myniftynails.com - did not match any documents.'
What's wrong? Well, nothing is actually wrong, Google is just telling you that it isn't aware of your site. You need to submit your site to Google in order for it to be spidered. You can do this for free at http://www.google.com/addurl.html You only need to do this once, and you only need to enter your main url. If you submit a site repeatedly, you risk getting it banned. You also need to improve your linking strategy. You can read some suggestions in the thread of the same name in 'chit-chat'. If your site falls into this category, I'd recommend doing this stuff today.
) that invisible area, it automatically decided to lump the two (or more) items together and produce them as a jpeg when I produced the page, meaning that rather than having say, two text boxes and a colour of pictures, it would see them all as one item (even though the images were all uploaded as separate jpegs) and IE would load them accordingly. As you can imagine the pages then took forever to load and this was back in the prodominently pre-broadband days, so it was a utter pain in the butt.
