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Why am I not listed in Google?

A summary article showing a number of ways to promote your site was mentioned in the How to Promote Your web site article. Below is an alternate way to look at some of the reasons of not being listed in Google.

Google uses robots known as 'spiders' to crawl the web on a monthly basis to find web pages for inclusion in the Google index.

1. Reasons your site may not be included.

• Your pages are dynamically generated. Google can not index pages that are created automatically in response to a database query for example.
• You employ doorway pages. Google does not encourage the use of doorway pages. A doorway page is a web page submitted to individual search engine spiders to meet specific relevancy algorithms. The doorway page presents information to the spider while obscuring it from human viewers. The purpose of doorway pages is to present the spider with the format it needs for optimum rankings while presenting a more appropriate version to human viewers. It's also a way for webmasters to avoid publicly disclosing placement tactics. The use of doorway pages customizes submission to each individual search engine. Also known as gateway pages, bridge pages, entry pages, portals or portal pages.
• Your page uses frames. Google supports frames to only a small extent. Frames tend to cause problems with search engines, bookmarks, emailing links, etc., 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.

2. Google does not index all of my pages. Why?

Please read the technology overview in How to Promote Your web site if you are not familiar with these concepts.

If your site's internal link structure does not provide a path to all your pages, the robot may not see all the pages on your site. Google follows links from one page to the next, so pages that are not linked to by others may be missed.

Basically, you can't buy your way into Google's actual search results. You can however, purchase advertising near the regular results.

B. My web pages used to be listed and now they aren't.

1. Changes from one index to the next.

Google updates their database of web pages (about once a month), and the index shifts: new sites are found, some sites are lost, and site rankings change. If your site was dropped from Google and you have not made major changes to it in the last month, it will likely pick it up again in the next index. It's possible your site was simply inaccessible when the robots tried to crawl it.

You may want to check and see if the number of other sites linking to your URL has decreased. This is the single biggest factor in determining what sites are indexed by Google. To find out who links to your site, use Google's link tool.

It's also possible your rank decreased because other sites were found and assigned a higher rank.

2. Multiple indices

Google's index is updated about every four weeks. It is possible that you may see results from an 'old' version of the index one time and a result from a 'new' version the next. Due to the size of the index, it can not be simultaneously updated.

3. Other reasons

If your page does not appear at all, here are some other possible explanations.

• Your site may not have been reachable when it was crawled because of network or hosting problems. When this happens, it retries multiple times, but if the site cannot be crawled, it will not be listed in the current index. If it was a transient problem, your site will likely show up in the next index, which will be completed in the next few weeks.
• A technical glitch may have caused a 'miss' your site, your site will likely show up in the next index.
• The contents of your page or the links pointing to your page changed significantly and you no longer have a sufficiently high PageRank, or your page had low PageRank to begin with and a small change caused you to be dropped from the Google index.
• Your page was manually removed from the index, because it did not conform with the quality standards necessary to assign accurate PageRank. Certain actions such as cloaking, writing text that can be seen by search engines but not by users, or setting up pages/links with the sole purpose of fooling search engines may result in permanent removal from the index.

What can you do? Read: How to find a Search Engine Expert.

References

More information can be found at Google.