One Easy Way To Find Out If Google Knows Your Website Exists

'Googlebot'. At the moment, those chaps really do control Earth. That's because Google is by far the most widely used search engine at this point in time, and unless something drastic happens, will be for the foreseeable future. Google's market share in the UK is 90.68% (Measured Jan 2011)

Have you ever wondered how Google knows which websites to place on Page 1 above all others, based just on one search phrase of just one word? How does that happen? How do they know what are the most relevant sites? And how do they deliver the search result pages (SeRPs) so quickly given that there must be billions of sites to look at ?

Quite simply, googlebots crawl the web. Constantly. They crawl all over the pages of every website, looking at the wording, the description of the pictures, keywords, and a hundred other things. Then they 'index' you under a suitable relevant category (e.g. (We, Google, have decided that Bob is a) decorator, interior, in Blackpool, speciality restaurants, hotels ).

Then, when a search is initiated, the search engine only has to look at the 'relatively few' sites that meet the search criteria. Sometimes 'relatively few' can mean over a million or just a few hundred; but that's basically how Google can access results quickly.

There are literally millions of sites being created daily, so it may be quite some time, perhaps months, before a new site gets crawled and indexed. Some may not get crawled at all (eventually they all will, but I do mean EVENTUALLY). The top and bottom of this, is that if your site hasn't yet been indexed by Google; your site will not be considered for display on results pages. Quite simply you don't exist.

To find out if your site has been indexed, go to Google's Homepage.

In the search bar type Site:{your site}

So for example for my own HW Marketing site, I would type Site:www.hwmarketing.co.uk

Don't forget the colon after 'site'.

If the site has been indexed, you will get results that display each of your site's pages.

You can see that each of my site's pages are indexed if you type it in in. If your results return something similar, then your site has been indexed; and that's the first step to reaching Page 1

However, if your results are blank, then your site hasn't been indexed and you don't exist.

To get your site indexed use the link below to SUBMIT your site to Google. http://www.google.co.uk/addurl

Submitting your site to Google is a request to be crawled and indexed (or re-crawled and re-indexed). It's the quickest way to get indexed. Your webmaster should have done this as a matter of course, but if you built your own site, you may not have done it yet. You can submit your site more than once. Consensus says only submit once a month otherwise Google may view it as spam and not only ignore the request but mark your site down a notch. Some SEO experts say even once a month is too much. What we all agree on is that a new site MUST be submitted asap.