In today’s changing business environment many organisations are turning to the internet to generate new revenue streams. So understandably there is a definitive need to be indexed and indexed well in leading search engines such as Google. Obviously not being indexed in a search engine such as Google would considerably limit your market and I am therefore going to outline some guidelines as set out by Google to try and get your site re-included in the index. The reasons for not being indexed or banned from the index are often a result of using black hat techniques such as hidden text and cloaking. Occassionally we have clients who comes to us after using such techniques.
The first thing site owners should do is familiarise themselves with the Google webmaster guidelines. This document will give you an idea of what Google considers to be unethical methods and what sort of things site owners should be doing to get their site indexed.
The next thing you can do is check to see if your site has any access issues. Google needs to be able to crawl your site on a regular basis and if it is unable to do so it will be unable to index your webpage. To see if you have any access issues you should setup Google webmaster tools. The diagnostic tool on there will give you useful information on your site and whether the site is being crawled. It would also be advisable to check your robots.txt file if you have one. Occasionally people do accidentally ban their sites from search engines through robots files.
The other thing to do is take a look at the overall workings and coding of your site. It is important to ensure that your site is not using any black hat techniques or outdated techniques. The webmaster guidelines should detail the sort of things you should avoid. Once your code is cleaned up and you have an up to date site then you should look at getting re-included.
The final stage is to put in a request to Google to try and get your site re-indexed. To do this you will need to login to webmaster tools and click on ‘request reconsideration’ under the tools tab. Once you have filled out the form you will then receive an email confirming the request. There is of course no guarantee of re-inclusion.
Mark
SEO Programmer
