How does Google work?

[DaFool]

I'm just wondering how soon it is when a page is launched for it to be listed in search terms.

Is it due to the number of popularity hits?

For free webpages, I doubt you really need to pay google to list your stuff up front.

But maybe you need to embed a special meta tag into your webpage?

So when should ones webpage start appearing on google? Once it's cross-linked a lot?

[chronoluminaire]

It's certainly meant to be the case that nobody can pay Google to prioritise their site.

Basically, it's the amount of links to the site. If links to a site appear from many different pages that Google knows about, then within a few weeks Google will crawl those links and find the site.

How high in the results you appear is a different business altogether, called search engine optimisation, about which much has been written.

[monele]

That's pretty much the whole thing . Also, nowadays, the content (words) is really what's important for keywords. There are HTML tags to specify keywords and stuff, but it was so abused that it's very low on the priority list now it seems. So... just get people to link to you and have an appropriate content... and it should be good .

[Jake]

So when should ones webpage start appearing on google? Once it's cross-linked a lot?

There certainly used to be a 'submit' link somewhere on Google's site where you could say "Hey, you don't seem to be indexing this site, here's the URL, go check it out". But I don't see it anywhere obvious any more... maybe it's been moved somewhere inside their 'webmaster services' stuff.

[Scout]

It's not necessary, anyway; google indexes pages very quickly. (I notice because I like to skim my server logs when I'm bored. The google bot shows up all the friggin' time.) There's not really much you can do, other than wait a few days for it to show up.

[Boch]

Late reply, but I just want to point out that Google does not support the "keywords" meta tag.

In fact, ever since 1998 (maybe earlier) a lot of search engines have officially dropped the meta tags support due to abuse by spammers and people who filled their meta tags with unrelated words.

I read somewhere that the only search engine that still officially supports the keywords meta tag is inktumi or inktomi... can't remember the name.

Google usually takes about less than a week to catch your page. Maybe even a few days.

[lordcloudx]

from experience, it usually takes one week or sometimes just a day to get your free website listed or updated.

here's that add url link
http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl

[DaFool]

I notice that Google often lists old information. What's the best way to force Google to update its records of your page?

[monele]

Have a website that updates often . You could also put a Sitemap (some xml file about updates) that Google interprets too. But in the end, it's mostly about your content.

[DaFool]

I tried this:

http://www.google.com/support/webmaster ... swer=35306

but doubled back on it.

It's better to actually cache it again with the new content, so I'll just wait for it.

The other thing I thought about doing is removing the page entirely from the listing (valid for several months) and readding it during that time, but too much trouble.

[PyTom]

It's been my experience that when a site updates frequently, google tends to crawl it constantly. If you take a look at who is online, you'll see that the forum is nearly constantly crawled by google. (And some of the other search engines.)

[yummy]

And I thought they used pigeons to reference webpages...

[Der Tor]

But aren't links still related to search ranking? Otherwise how is it it possible that only crappy 10 year old sites with lots of biased information show up first, while regurlarly updated sites discussing the respective topic in detail are so far back that they have no visitors? (that's what happened to my site )-:

[yummy]

Actually, I know for sure that google takes info from other reference sites that are known for their relevance such as this one.
You might try to ask for indexation for your site here, google does index it when you index your site there.

[Der Tor]

you are right. My site is one of the few not in that list, and the sites that show up on google first are all on the list.