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Getting More Than Your Index Page Indexed 
By: Chris Richardson 2006-05-22 One of the complaints I've noticed from people starting out in the SEO/SEM world is finding out their site's index page is the only one that's been included into a search index, something that could be a considerable issue if you have a multi-page site. What are some of things one can do if they are facing such a dilemma? How can a webmaster get Google, et al to index the remaining pages of their site? Well, there are a couple of tips to consider, as some of our WebProWorld posters have demonstrated: Brian.Mark, longtime WebProWorld moderator and speaker at many SEM conferences offers this advice: In the travel industry, you're going to need a whole lot more links to get any rankings. I realize you only asked about getting indexed, but next you'll want rankings. Get more links, preferably to the pages that aren't being indexed, and you should see both improving. As you can see, accumulating quality links pointing to your site is still the primary way of affecting your rankings in a positive. This thinking also applies to sites attempting to get pages other than their index added to a search engine. If quality links are pointing to other content pages, Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask.com will find these pages and index them accordingly; and as many of you already know, following links is how search bots discover pages in the first place. Another technique, which also plays into the link strategy, is to include and submit a sitemap. In case you are unaware, Google describes a sitemap as: ...an easy way for you to submit all your URLs to the Google index and get detailed reports about the visibility of your pages on Google. With Google Sitemaps you can automatically keep us informed of all your web pages, and when you make changes to these pages to help improve your coverage in the Google crawl. As you can see, even though you are submitting a document to assist Google, it is still operating under the "discovering pages by following links" process. Yahoo accepts sitemap submissions as well (Yahoo also accepts individual page submissions, done so by submitting a the page's link), but unlike Google's, Yahoo sitemaps must be in text file format: A text file containing a list of URLs, each URL at the start of a new line. The filename of the URL list file must be urllist.txt; for a compressed file the name must be urllist.txt.gz. Another aspect to consider when it comes to the SERPs is patience. Of course, we'd all be happy if Google and the others reflected the changes and improvements being made to a site immediately, but that's probably not going to happen on a regular basis. You have to give the engines time to discover, index and rank these pages. It is important to consider that these engines are dealing with indices containing billions of pages. Just because the changes you or others have made aren't being reflected immediately doesn't mean your work was in vain. Discuss other methods of getting an entire site indexed, as opposed to just the homepage, at WebProWorld. About the Author: Chris is a staff writer for iEntry, focusing on the search industry. |
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