google

My web pages have never been included in the Google index

Google is a mechanized search engine, which employs robots known as ‘spiders’ to crawl the web on a monthly basis and find sites for inclusion in the Google index.

Reasons your site may not be included.

1) Your pages are dynamically generated. Google are able to index dynamically generated pages. However, because the web crawler can easily overwhelm and crash sites serving dynamic content, Google limit the amount of dynamic pages it indexes.

2) You employ doorway pages. Google does not encourage the use of doorway pages. Google want to point users to content pages, not to doorways or splash screens.

3) Your page uses frames. Google supports frames to the extent that it can. Frames tend to cause problems with search engines, bookmarks, emailing links and so on, because frames don’t fit the conceptual model of the web (every page corresponds to a single URL). If a user’s query matches the site as a whole, Google returns the frame set. If a user’s query matches an individual page on the site, Google returns that page. That individual page is not displayed in a frame — because there may be no frame set corresponding to that page.

If you are concerned with the description of your site as seen by search engines, please read “Search Engines and Frames”. It describes the use of the ‘NoFrames’ tag, which is used to provide alternative content. If, instead of providing alternative content, you use wording such as “This site requires the use of frames” or “Upgrade your browser”, then you are excluding both search engines and people who use browsers with frames turned off. (For example, audio web browsers, such as those used in automobiles and by the visually impaired, typically do not deal with frames, which are a visual mechanism.)

Excerpt taken from Google Webmaster Info

Why does my Google pagerank keep changing?

Google update their index about once a month. Each time Google update othe database of web pages, the index invariably shifts: new sites are found, some sites are lost, and sites ranking may change.

Your rank naturally will be affected by changes in the ranking of other sites. You can be assured that no one at Google has hand adjusted the results to boost the ranking of a site. Google’s order of results is automatically determined by several factors, including our PageRank algorithm. Please check out our Technology Overview page for more information on how this works.

You may want to check and see if the number of other sites linking to your URL has changed. This is the single biggest factor in determining what sites are indexed by Google, as Google find most pages when the robots crawl the web and jump from page to page via hyperlinks.

Excerpt taken from Google Webmaster Info

How does Google rank pages?

Google’s order of results is automatically determined by more than 100 factors, including Google’s PageRank algorithm.

Please check out Google’s Technology Overview page for more details. Due to the nature of our business and our interest in protecting the integrity of our search results, this is the only information Google make available to the public about the ranking system.

Excerpt taken from Google Webmaster Info

I don’t want Google to crawl part or all of my site

There is a standard method involving a “robots.txt” file for excluding robot crawlers. This will prevent Googlebot or other crawlers from visiting your site. Googlebot has a user-agent of “Googlebot”. In addition, Googlebot understands some extensions to the robots.txt standard: Disallow patterns may include * to match any sequence of characters, and patterns may end in $ to indicate that the $ must match the end of a name. For example, to prevent Googlebot from crawling files that end in gif, you may use the following robots.txt entry:

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /*.gif$

There is another standard for telling robots not to index a particular web page or follow links on it, which may be more helpful, since it can be used on a page-by-page basis. This method involves placing a “META” element into a page of HTML.

Remember, changing your server’s robots.txt file or changing the “META” elements on its pages will not cause an immediate change in what results Google returns. It is likely that it will take a while for any changes you make to propagate to Google’s next index of the web.

Excerpt taken from Google Webmaster Info

I don’t want Google to cache my site

Google automatically takes a “snapshot” of each page it crawls and caches it. This enables us to show the search terms highlighted on text heavy pages so users can find relevant information quickly, and to retrieve pages for users if the site’s server temporarily fails. Users can access the cached version by choosing the “Cached” link on the search results page. If you do not want your content to be accessible through Google’s cache, you can use the NOARCHIVE meta-tag. Place this in the section of your documents:

This tag will tell robots not to archive the page. Google will continue to index and follow links from the page, but will not present cached material to users.

If you want to allow other robots to archive your content, but prevent Google’s robots from caching, you can use the following tag:

Note that the change will occur the next time Google crawls the page containing the NOARCHIVE tag (typically about once a month). If you want the change to take effect sooner than this, the site owner must contact us and request immediate removal of archived content. Also, the NOARCHIVE directive only controls whether the cached page is shown. To control whether the page is indexed, use the NOINDEX tag; to control whether links are followed, use the NOFOLLOW tag.

Excerpt taken from Google Webmaster Info