Web Design Adelaide

A common question we hear from people with brand new websites is, “Why can’t I find my website in Google?”

Short answer:  Google hasn’t indexed it yet.  And this is a process that can take anywhere from a few days, to a couple of weeks.

But, like me, I can hear most of you scratching your heads and wondering:  “What the hell is ‘indexing’?”

Basically, Google has a Googlebot, which is their very clever web crawling robot.  Googlebot continuously crawls through the internet and retrieves new pages and passes them to the Google Indexer.  The Indexer then has to sort through every word on the page of a site, and stores those words in a huge database.  When someone submits a search/query via Google, the indexer uses that database to pull its results. This process can take a long time as first the Googlebot needs to find your new website and then has to analyse it.

To encourage indexing to happen as quickly as possible, we submit all new websites that we create via Google’s ‘addURL’ form.  However there is no guarantee that this will speed the process up, as there is literally tens of thousands of users doing this every day. 

One thing that will definitely speed the indexing process up is getting relevant and trusted backlinks to your website.  These backlinks could come from relevant industry bodies, from your suppliers, or even from local directory listings such as Hotfrog and StartLocal.

Alternatively website owners can submit what is called an XML sitemap of their site to the search engines that tells the Googlebot and other crawlers to check every single page of your site. An XML sitemap is a type of file or “feed” that can be automatically generated using websites such as http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ and others.

I hope this helps you with you search engine success!

Google has always been a company pushing the limits of development and innovation and recently a new project codenamed “Caffeine”, has been getting a bit of attention.

Caffeine isn’t a new search engine but instead, is the next evolvement of the current Google search engine. Caffeine has been best described as making some modifications “under the hood”.

Google’s Matt Cutts mentions in a video interview with Web Pro News that engineers were working hard to ensure that the user experience would remain largely the same, but as with any upgrades and modifications there were bound to be some instances where rankings appear a little differently.  It’s expected that the interface will remain the same but that some power users would probably notice some differences in search results where regular users would remain largely unaffected.

As for whether this is a response to the release of Bing, Matt mentions that Google have had a team of engineers working on Caffeine for months and that this update was in the works long before Bing was announced.

Google “Caffeine” is technically a re-writing of the indexing system that creates the large database of web pages from around the globe. Basically it means Google will find, index and rank data much faster and allow real time and semantic indexing to be a lot more powerful. To make sure that everyone is happy with the updates Google have released a version of Caffeine in the Google sandbox and are asking searchers to provide feedback on their observations, you can test it out here.

As Google is accepting feedback on the changes, they expect a slow, incremental deployment of Google “Caffeine” over the coming months to make sure it’s a win / win for everyone involved.

We guess only time will tell how the updates are received and will be interesting to keep an eye on searcher activity on Bing as these two internet giants battle to be the King of Search. However for now that crown remains firmly placed upon Google’s head!

It has been talked about for a while but finally Microsoft through its newly released search engine Bing and Yahoo! have struck a deal which will see them have enough market share to begin to tackle the Google dominance.

What does that mean for the average Internet user? According to the official Microsoft Press Release it will mean the following:

For Web users and advertisers, this deal will accelerate the pace and breadth of innovation by combining both companies’ complementary strengths and search platforms into a market competitor with the scale to fuel sustained development in search and search advertising. Users will find what they care about faster and with more personal relevance. Microsoft’s competitive search platforms will lead to more value for advertisers, better results for web publishers, and increased innovation and efficiency across the Internet.

Ultimately it will mean more competition and better search platforms for users. Bing, since its release has turned heads and made small in roads, particularly with its simplicity and usual Microsoft flair. Yahoo! has a big community of users (although not necessarily search) and many great tools to use. So it would seem the deal to join forces should give Google something to worry about and it will be very interesting to see how they respond.

To read more about the deal visit the official Microsoft Press Release or the Mini Site.