Chapter 11
Getting Your Pages into
the Search Engines
In This Chapter
Submitting your pages to the search engines
Employing Google and Yahoo! sitemaps
Using paid-inclusion services
Submitting to secondary search engines
Using registration services and software
Y
ou’ve built your Web pages. Now, how do you get them into the search
systems. That’s what this chapter and the next chapter explain. In this
chapter, I talk about how to get your pages into the search engines, and in
Chapter 12 I explain how to get your site listed with the search directories.
Many site owners are confused about how they get their Web sites into
search engines. They assume that to submit or register their sites, they go to
a search engine’s Web site, provide the URL to one (or all) of their pages, and
wait for the search engine to come along and index the pages. The truth is
more complicated.
Why Won’t They Index Your Pages.
It’s frustrating when you can’t seem to get search engines to index your site.
The top three search engines — Google, Yahoo!, and MSN — provide a way
for you to submit information about your site, but doing so often doesn’t
seem to make any difference. Your site may not be picked up. As Google says,
“We do not add all submitted URLs to our index, and we cannot make any
predictions or guarantees about when or if they will appear." MSN is a little
more positive, perhaps, but still offers no guarantee: “Submitting your site
does not guarantee that your site will be indexed. But it does help us locate
your site so that MSNBot can try to crawl it." Ask.com doesn’t even provide a
way for you to submit.
