Why Google Isn’t Visiting Your Website

So you’ve built your website. It has a nice user-friendly design and great content. Yet, visitors are few and far in between. Even worse, search engines don’t visit often to index your content.

Below, we address some common problems which may prevent or delay websites from being indexed by Google.

Reasons Google Isn’t Visiting

1. You have not submitted your website here.
2. The domain name is newly registered or has been recently bought from another owner. (See our article on the Google Sandbox for more information.)
3. Website does not have easily indexable content, such as text in flash, AJAX, or frames.
4. Textual content may seem like spam. This can happen if you repeat key words too often in your content.
5. Server is unresponsive, pages are inaccessible, or pages are slow-loading.
6. Website uses dynamic and unfriendly links which contain question marks (?), equal signs (=), and ampersands (&).
7. No inbound links. (See our article on Inbound Links for additional information.)
8. Pages are not easily reached via navigational links and no sitemap is supplied.

Quick Fixes

In most cases, getting Google to visit your website is just a matter of fixing the small problems listed above. Once done, be sure to resubmit your website. You should also be actively seeking out new opportunities to get inbound links. This includes requesting links from other websites, as well as submitting your site to various other search engines and directories.

In some cases, however, due to the sandbox effect, websites with newly registered domains may have to wait for an extended period of time before Google starts calculating its ranking.

For more information on why Google and other search engines may not be visiting your website see our article Why Isn’t My Website Being Indexed By Search Engines?.