How does Google Look Up New Websites and Domain Names?

Any serious person looking to invest in an online business or whose business is looking to derive a substantial amount of sales online, must have asked themselves this question. Understanding how Google looks up new domain names and websites, and proceeds to index them will help you formulate a formidable internet marketing strategy.

When a domain name is first registered, Google does not know about it yet. Google gets to know about your domain name if one of three things happens. One, you can submit the domain name to Google yourself using their “submit a URL” feature. Secondly, you or someone else may create a link to your domain or webpage from a page that is already indexed by Google. Thirdly, your domain registrar may park the domain for you on their servers if you do not have a website yet. In all these three cases, Google will get to know your domain exists and shall send their program, technically known as a “bot”, to check out your site. This “bot” or “spider” as it is more commonly referred to, shall crawl your site and enter the data into the index at Google’s servers.

Now this is where the headache begins. If your site is already parked by your domain registrar, the Google spider shall realize this and accord your domain a low priority status in its index. After all Google is interested in providing its users with useful content and they try and achieve this as much as possible in their search engine results. A parked page has little useful content. Once your site is flagged as low priority, it will take some serious work to get the spiders back once your site is up and you have useful content.

So how does one go around this? There are a number of ways to ensure that your site is not given a low ranking even before your site is up. To begin with, you can avoid registering the domain until your site is ready. However, this presents a problem if you find an excellent high quality domain name and you need to register it immediately. You can go around this by putting up an “under construction” page with a basic article that contains some useful information. This way, when the spider comes visiting there will be some useful content to index and your domain shall not appear as a parked page – very important.

However, even this shall not guarantee a good ranking. If your domain is newly registered, you must contend with the Google sandbox. The sandbox is a phenomenon that observed with new domains where Google appears to lock you out of a favorable ranking until your domain is at least 8 months old. Google neither confirms nor denies such a policy but it exists. Luckily, even the Sandbox can be beaten by purchasing a high quality generic domain name that is over 8 months old. Old domains are not sandboxed and you should get better a better ranking than you would with a new domain.