I was explaining this to a friend of mine a few weeks ago (as well as the logic behind it) and he asked me almost in amazement “how do you know this?...” My answer was something like “erm… I don’t remember, I just know, I read it somewhere”. An answer from someone who has clearly spent too much time online.
If all your sites are indexed by Google and you know everything about everything then you won’t be reading this, if on the other hand you would like to see your domain appear in the Google search results instead of:
“Your search - www.yourdomain.com - did not match any documents”
… then read on, this technique should get you listed in Yahoo! and MSN as well.
So to get listed in the search engines you will need to do the following:
- Create a blog at blogger.com
- Write an article with a text link to the site you want listed (and post the article on your blog)
- If you don’t have them already then create an email account at Yahoo!, Hotmail and create an account at Google
- Copy the xml link in Blogger and add it to your Yahoo email, hotmail and Goggle Reader
- Ping your blog at pingomatic.com
Wait for search engine spiders (about 2 weeks or less)
A quick explanation
Search engines like fresh content to serve to their visitors, blogs are often updated frequently and do not normally have a business focus like say a .com
So rather than submit your .com domain to the search engines you can “let” the search engines find you.
When a search engine indexes a website (or a blog) it will usually follow through to the links – i.e. your site.
Google owns Blogger, it stands to reason that Google indexes the content from all the blogs at Blogger.com (Blogger has it’s own search engine – this engine wouldn’t work if the blogs hadn’t been indexed;o)
Yahoo will index the news feeds you will put in your “My Yahoo!” likewise MSN will index the link you put in your hotmail account, same with Google Reader.
When you create a new post in your blog and alert the blog indexing services using pingomatic – Yahoo!, MSN, Google will all see that a news feed has been updated and will come along to read it (in my own experience) much sooner than they would have come to look at the website if you had submitted it directly).
Click here for a step-by-step guide (with screen shots) on how to list your web site on Google.
