5 Steps To Get Indexed By Google Within 48 Hours
Within two days of launching this blog, the homepage was indexed by Google, and the monster search engine began to find my articles. Now, it could have been sooner, but I didn’t check beforehand, so it was at most 48 hours.
Why Is This Significant?
Well, you only have to browse webmaster forums for a few minutes before you find people complaining, because it’s been six weeks since their site launched, and Google still haven’t found them.
Since I’ve started blogging, I’ve launched four different sites, each of them dealing with completely different topics, and each indexed by Google within 4-5 days.
So how come some sites takes weeks, and mine have taken a few days? Well, there are certain ways to help Google not only find your site, but to show them that your site is worthwhile. Here are five steps to get your site indexed by Google as fast as possible.
1. Write A Handful Of Unique, Pillar Articles
This is the first thing you do, without a doubt. Before you leave a comment, send an email or anything where you might place a link to your site, make sure you have some unique articles posted. Not only unique, but good. You’ll read of some people referring to writing “pillar articles”. These are articles that are timeless; they’re as beneficial after six months, as they were when first published.
If you have a look at my archives, and you’ll notice on the first day of this blog I posted three articles, and another three on the second day. In doing so, I had plenty of unique content to satisfy any early browsers, but more importantly, there was content for when the Google spiders would arrive.
2. Link To Others
Because your first articles are going to be so excellent, in each article, deep-link to a few related articles (not the homepage) written by others. I suggest you don’t link to the big shots, but good, solid, relatively popular and friendly blogs. In doing so, hopefully the trackback will be picked up by the blog owner, and because your article is so great, he just has to link to it to tell his readers.
Unless the trackback links are DoFollow, your link to the other blog will not help Google. But if the owner decides to link to your article (which they might, especially if you buttered them up in the article), then Google (and other search engines) follow the link.
3. Comment On Blogs With DoFollow
Recently, there has been a backlash against the (sometimes) unnecessary ‘NoFollow’ attributed to outbound links. Wanting to reward those who make the effort, lots of webmasters have started to DoFollow the link left by those that leave comments on their blogs, including me.
After writing a few articles, find such blogs (I’ve linked to a few there to get you started 
) and leave a few comments. However, whatever you do, don’t leave a comment like, “Hey! Great site!”, because that’s just plain wrong. Compliment an article that has benefited you, ask a question, dialogue with others in the conversation, etc.
By doing this, you will create inbound links to your site, helping the Google to find you.
4. Comment On Blogs With A Top Commentator List
In a similar way to above, some webmasters like to say thank you to those that leave comments on their blog, by having a list in their sidebar of the top comment contributers to their blog. If your blog launch is at the beginning of the month, find blogs that offer this, and you’ve a good chance of getting onto some of these lists by leaving a few comments. But again, make sure they aren’t spammy comments.
5. Have A Sitemap
What is a Sitemap? Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site. [source].
Knowing that the vast majority of you are WordPress users, the easiest option for you is to download the Google Sitemap Generator plugin. Install and activate this plugin after you have done step 1 and 3. By then, you’ll have content and links, and whenever you ping Google to come to your site, you can almost guarantee you’ll be indexed.
Conclusion
I can not guarantee your site will be indexed in 48 hours, but if your follow these steps it will most certainly increase your chances of being found early.
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Comments
19 Responses to “5 Steps To Get Indexed By Google Within 48 Hours”
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Thanks for this post - good tips. Many people, it seems, put stuff up on a site and sit back and wait for Google to find them, so these pro-active steps are important.
Hey, thanks for the tips. But for some reason google is not indexing my pages and i have done all of the above. it is only indexing 2 random pages. check it ou http://www.google.com/search?q=site:theguitarresource.com&hl=en
also, i have used these tactics in the past with other blogs and they worked quite well. i am stumped on this one as this is my best blog with the best content and most links of them all…
I went public with it last sunday, but it has been live for 3 weeksish. i think i had a screwy robots.txt file at first which may have had something to do with it, but i fixed that like 3 days ago. any ideas??? thanks!
Very useful tips for those just starting.
I’d have been extremely happy to have found this post when I first launched my site.
I second the importance of keeping your followed comments relevant, and be sure to add to the conversation. I’m always a little wary of new visitors who leave one line comments that aren’t particularly constructive to the article.
I totally agree. I started wealth building lessons by writing good content about 6-8 before the google PR update. not only was it indexed within a few days but it debuted with a PR 5!
Randa - Thanks, I hope they help new bloggers take some action.
Ross - I found your dialogue with others on the DP forum, and if you’ve followed the advice given, just give it a few more days. Have you tried submitting manually?
David - Thanks my friend.
It’s quite upsetting when people fly through, leaving a comment without really meaning what they say, or adding to the conversation. I had to rebuke a relative some time ago. I told them to ‘network’, connect to others, leave comments, etc, so that their site would become known. I caught them leaving, “Hey, great site!” type comments
AIMM - That’s quite amazing that it got a PR5. The highest I’ve ever come across for a domains first PR is PR4! Nice one!
Google Sitemaps seems to work for me. I have one for main site that runs Joomla CMS and of course one for Wordpress. I made some changes the other night and the next day Google had indexed them. I was recently at organised Microsoft event and they announce a similar service to Google Sitemaps out in September.
Jamie
My site is still underconstruction but google found it and indexed very fast. 100+ pages already ultill I block it with robots.txt
Armen,
Thanks for the response. I have updated my robots.txt file based on the advice in DP forums. it is http://theguitarresource.com/robots.txt
But still nothing, it has been almost a week. I guess i’ll ait and see. If it is still not showing up in a week i will have to get more worried and maybe hire some help. Thanks for the great blog post btw!
Jamie - That’s a nice, clean blog you have there. Before I tried WordPress, I actually had Joomla installed, ready to use it. I’m glad I decided to give WP a try now; it’s so much faster, simpler, and in some ways, better.
What do you think of the difference between the two?
Nice - That’s good news. I await the launch of your site with patience
Ross - Read this article on robots.txt and see if it sheds a little more light on what to do.
Great advice! I’ve read that it’s also advisable to include a line in your ROBOTS.TXT file indicating the location of your sitemap file, like so:
Sitemap: http://www.domainname.com/sitemap.xml
Anyone have any experience with how effective that is?
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Rob - I’m not sure if it would aid the spiders in finding all your pages any faster. It’s an interesting idea though. Like I’ve said, I haven’t had any trouble with my site being indexed as yet.
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One of the biggest selling points for WordPress as you mentioned is simplistically. I also like the fact you can use desktop clients to update the site. I think this is a must for small businesses, selling the concept of updating your webiste/blog on regular basis, etc. Although Joomla is still a great product you can bolt on eCommerce and rental add-on, something I’m doing for a client at the moment.
Jamie
Jamie - Joomla is very powerful, there’s no doubt about that. In fact, I had it installed on one of my first domains, but I eventually moved over to WordPress simply because it’s a lot more straightforward.
Those google sitemaps really DO wonders on the index speed sometimes.
We recently got new pages indexed in less than one week by just creating the sitemap and submitting it via webmaster tools. No need to spam comments.
Jens - Thanks for the testimonial. Testimonies are what add vital weight to an article, so it’s much appreciated.
Your blog is very informative, I have learned so much from it. It is like daily newspaper :). Added to fav’s.