Google PageRank - What Is It And Is It Important?

Written By Trevor A. Winchell

Before we begin, let's take a look at the very definition of PageRank as provided by the good folks at Google. PageRank is defined as:

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."

What this means is that PageRank acts as a balloting system. Hyperlinks that point to your website from another website are casting a "vote" of support for your site. The more hyperlinks pointing to your website, the more "votes" of support you have, the higher your site PageRank will be.

The question often asked "Is PageRank really all that important?". The answer to this question is widely debated and often a hot topic in forums. The answer to this question is "YES" PageRank is important! In fact, it may be more important than many so-called "experts" would lead you to believe

The Truth About PageRank
PageRank is a term that you'll often find associated with Search Engine Optimization (SEO). The fact is, PageRank and SEO have very little in common. A website with a high PageRank value may very well be completely off the radar of any organic searches in Google. On the same token, a website with low PageRank can be ranked in the top 10 of Google Searches. For this reason some "experts" believe that PageRank has little to no value as it does not directly reflect in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). Although that may be true, their thoughts that PageRank isn't important are very misguided and inaccurate and could result in lost revenue for their clients.

Let's look at this with a theoretical example. Let's assume that everyone in this giant world of ours has been born with two very different degrees of color perception. One-half sees the color of the sky as red and the other half sees the color of the sky as blue. No matter how much the blue sky population tries to convince the red sky population that the sky is REALLY blue, the red sky population insist the sky is REALLY red. Now, are the red sky people wrong in their belief that the sky is red? Their perception that the sky is red is their reality, just as the blue sky population's perception that the sky is blue is their reality. There is no convincing one side or the other of their beliefs. Of course, this is just a silly example to show a point (after all, everyone knows the sky is really pink). What it really comes down to is perception and that is exactly why PageRank is important! Many users and webmasters perceive PageRank as a measuring stick that indicates the strength and popularity of any given website. Perception is reality and that little green bar hanging out in your Google toolbar feeds that perception.

Turning Perception Into Profit
Joe user comes upon your site while searching a specific piece of information or product. He doesn't find exactly what he wants but he finds your site pleasant to look at and finds some useful information. He then looks up at his Google toolbar and sees your site has a PageRank (PR) of 0. Joe user is somewhat tech-savvy but not a hard-core techie and not someone that readily keeps up with technology, but he's read enough Google marketing propaganda to know that the little green bar in his Google browser is telling him something about this site. It's telling him "this site is not a popular site!". Joe user decides not to bookmark the site based on his perception that it's not popular. Instead he moves on to a competitors website. Joe user is probably in the minority of users and may not even have a clue what the PR number is really telling him. What he's doing is perceiving it as measuring stick that tells him about a website's quality and popularity. Joe is a casualty of the "PageRank Effect" and a potential sale gone by the way side. The goal of any good website is to convert as many visitors into sales as possible. For that reason alone PageRank should be considered important.

Would You Take Financial Advice From A Bum?
The market of your website will be a huge factor in determining how your PageRank value will be interpreted. If your website is designed to sell SEO services to clients and you have a PR0, how do you think that will come across to users? Your average user will not understand that PR0 has no bearing on the quality of your service yet they will use that value against you. Let's look at a real-world example using the Free Links Direct service. Like every new site, Free Links Direct hit the market with a PR0. They engaged in a strong marketing campaign and saw a fair number of sign-ups, but their support team received a very LARGE volume of emails with a similar theme: "If your an SEO company, how come you have a PageRank of 0? How can I trust you to increase my rankings when you yourself can't increase yours?" Even though Free Links Direct was (and still is) a Free SEO service, there was a hesitation by a large number of webmasters to sign-up solely based on the PageRank value. When Google finally updated PageRank for websites (typically happens every 100 days) Free Links Direct shot up from PR0 to PR5 literally overnight. The result? Sign-ups increased by a rate of almost 2 times and the emails about PR virtually disappeared, much to the delight of the support team. The moral? Know your market and understand your PageRank may (and probably will) have an impact on your business.

Want To Trade Links? Not So Fast!
Link exchanges are an important aspect of SEO. One of the main factors in determining a website placement in the search results is the number of links pointing to it. Even though reciprocating links (website A links to B and B links back to A) are not weighted as heavily as one-way links (website A links to B and B does not link back), they are still important to your link campaign strategy. Webmasters with high PR websites are unlikely to link exchange with websites that have no or low PR. What this does is put you behind the eight ball. Webmasters with higher PR values will continue to link exchange with other high PR sites and you'll find your site lagging behind. One way to prove this theory is to contact the webmaster of a high PR ranking website (ex: PR6 or higher) and request a link exchange with your low PR website. Most likely you won't even get a response back, and if you do it will be the webmaster declining your exchange request.

Sell That Link Space!
Did you know webmasters are willing to pay as much as $100 or more PER MONTH for you to link to them? There is a strong demand in the link market for one-way links. Take a look at the online casino gambling community. Many webmasters are paying hundreds of dollars month over month just to have other gambling related websites link to their own. It's a huge market that you can capitalize on, but NOT if you have a website with little to no PR. If you have a low PR website you might as well forget about selling your link space. The real money will come to those with high PR sites. The higher your PR, the more valuable your link space becomes, and the more money you'll make. Let's assume you have space for 10 links on your home page and you have a PR8. You can expect to fetch up to $100 or more per link each month with a PR8 website. That's a recurring $1000 every month just to link to other websites! You'll be surprised by the amount of revenue you can generate through advertising dollars. If you ignore PR, you'll be loosing out on this potential gold mine.

The benefits of a high PageRank website far outweigh any negatives. In fact, one can say there really are NO negatives in having a website with a high PageRank value. It will create a better perception of your website, lead to potentially more sales and more links, and will allow you to gain revenue through marketing dollars that you never would have achieved with a low ranking website. So, the next time someone tells you "PageRank is NOT important" just nod in agreement. There is no point in trying to change their mind on something they are convinced of. After all, PageRank is mostly about perception and we very well know perception is greater than reality.

Use Google Sitemaps For Best SEO

Written By Trevor A. Winchell

You need SEO for your website, and you’ve done all your homework: keyword research, keyword optimization, onsite SEO (META tags, alt tags, keyword rich content, etc), offsite SEO (linking strategies: articles, press releases, blogs, forums, directories), advertising and so on. There is one more thing you need to complete your efforts: SEO with Google Sitemaps.

First of all you should know what a Google Sitemap is not: a guarantee of getting high ranks in the Google search engine positioning results or higher PageRanks. A Sitemap is not a tool that forces Google robots to crawl on demand, but a tool that makes the crawler more effective by providing a clear structure of your website.

Now let’s take a look at the benefits of Google Sitemaps:

Google Sitemaps is a tool that helps Google index web pages faster. You don’t (and should never) submit your site to Google, but your Sitemap. This Sitemap tells Google about the most important web pages of your website and how often you change them. Basically you help Google crawl your pages smarter.

You can see how Google indexes your website, whether there are crawl errors or not, which of your pages are indexed by Google, how many pages refer to your website and how many link to your website, etc. You will notice that Google shows fewer links than, let’s say Yahoo! That’s because Google has other algorithms and other relevancy queries.

Google Sitemaps and the Google Searcher

You can submit up to 200 sitemaps, so there are some limitations. However, this free Google service has already proved its efficiency and you should really consider using it, at least for the Google Sitemap statistics. Even if you don’t submit a Sitemap you’ll still be able to see what queries and keywords people use when they find your website. You’ll get results from the top searches, top searches from mobile devices and top searchers from the mobile web.

You’ll know whether people find you for the keywords you have been targeting or for other keywords. This will help you optimize your content. If most of your visitors find your website for only one or two fractions of your content – let’s say home-made wine – that’s an important niche and you should probably consider expanding its content to keep visitors interest.

Conclusion: Google Sitemaps is also a tool that enables you to see what’s going on in the mind of a Google searcher.

Google Sitemaps and Page Statistics

Another great advantage is that you no longer need to purchase expensive software to analyze your pages. Google’s page analysis displays some important keyword information: you’ll be able to see what words are most common on your website and what in the anchor text of the links that point to your website.

Google is also reporting on how it crawls your pages. If Google fails at it, you’d definitely want to know about it: to get them properly indexed, you need your pages to be linked and set up correctly. Once Google discovers the errors, they will appear in the page statistics. All you need to do is fix those errors.

You can find the Google site map page here: https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/

Search Engine Optimization in 15 Minutes: How To Guide

Written By Trevor A. Winchell

Are you ready to hear something unbelievable? It's not that hard to get website traffic from search engines. All you need to do is follow a certain guidelines from major search engines like Google and follow some of my tips here.

Here are some of my search engine optimization tips for you:

1) Don't pay a company to submit your website to search engines using an automated procedure because this technique often fails; search engines often ignore these submissions. In fact: Website Submission does not work anymore. You should submit your site to these search engines and directories yourself, or pay someone to manually submit your site. You can also look into search engine advertising (using advertising programs like Google AdWord). Yes it costs money but it ensures placement of your business name and website link in a visible position on the search engine page.

2) To optimize your search engine ranking (you want to be in the top 10 and preferably the top five), you must understand how your customers think and want. What does he/she know about your product or service? What keywords will he/she be most likely to type into a search engine? Get to know your current and potential customers so you can answer these questions.

3) Learn more about search engine optimization, even if you plan to work with a web designer. You can find free resources online or buy a book so you can dig into the methodology, find many useful tips about keyword searches and design your keyword references and tags to satisfy the most common words people use to search for your products.

4) Don't think your work is done after you manually submitted your site to search engines. The fact is, you have just begun! Website success takes time and effort. Even if you are recognized by a search engine, and your ranking is high one day or during a given week, it may slip the following week because of new sites or because your competition changes its site to get a better ranking. You must continually monitor your rankings. That's one of the keys to better search engine rankings

5) When you are looking at your website and deciding where to use keywords, keep in mind that you can use keywords in graphics ALT tag, but they must be in captions or in the file title, and not embedded under a graphic as a false lead. Of course, don't bother creating a picture or graphic that contains a word (animated or static). The search engines can't index words that appear inside pictures.

That's it! Here are some of my tips to better search engine optimization. Read this article again, apply them and you will see your website rocket through the roof!

Search Engine Robo Cops

Written By: Trevor A. Winchell - Gooyah Search Founder

The Robots.txt protocol, also called the “robots exclusion standard” is designed to lock out web spiders from accessing part of a website. It is a security or privacy measure, the equivalent of hanging a “Keep Out” sign on your door.

This protocol is used by web site administrators when there are sections or files that they would rather not be accessed by the rest of the world. This could include employee lists, or files that they are circulating internally. For example, the White House website uses robots.txt to block any inquiries on speeches by the Vice President, a photo essay of the First Lady, and profiles of the 911 victims.

How does the protocol work? It lists the files that shouldn’t be scanned, and places it in the top-level directory of the website. The robots.txt protocol was created by consensus in June 1994 by members of the robots mailing list (robots-request@nexor.co.uk). There is no official standards body or RFC for the protocol, so it’s difficult to legislate or mandate that the protocol be followed. In fact, the file is treated as strictly advisory, and does not have absolute guarantee that those contents won’t be read.

In effect, robot.txt requires cooperation by the web spider and even the reader, since anything that is uploaded into the internet becomes publicly available. You aren’t locking them out of those pages, you are just making it harder for them to get in. But it takes very little for them to ignore these instructions. Computer hackers can also easily penetrate the files and retrieve information. So the rule of thumb is—if it’s that sensitive, it shouldn’t be on your website to begin with.

Care, however, should be taken to ensure that the Robots.txt protocol doesn’t block the website robots from other areas of the website. This will dramatically affect your search engine ranking, as the crawlers rely on the robots to count the keywords, review metatags, titles and crossheads, and even register the hyperlinks.

One misplaced hyphen or dash can have catastrophic effects. For example, the robots.txt patterns are matched by simple substring comparisons, so care should be taken to make sure that patterns matching directories have the final '/' character appended: otherwise all files with names starting with that substring will match, rather than just those in the directory intended.

To avoid these problems, consider submitting your site to a search engine spider simulator, also called search engine robot simulator. These simulators—which can be bought or downloaded from the internet— use the same processes and strategies of different search engines and give you a “dry run” of how they will read your site. They will tell you which pages are skipped, which links are ignored, and which errors are encountered. Since the simulators will also reenact how the bots will follow your hyperlinks, you’ll see if your robot.txt protocol is interfering with the search engine’s ability to read through all the necessary pages.

It’s also important to review your robot.txt files, which will enable you to spot any problems and correct them before you submit them to real search engines.

Automated SEO

Written By: Trevor A. Winchell - Gooyah Search Founder

In the next few years, webmasters will be able to use automated SEO techniques on their websites. This will be done via a content management system, and it will make things much easier and faster. However, this doesn't mean that optimization services will become obsolete. While having an optimized site is good, if visitors can't find it, the site won't get traffic. Because of this, more online companies will begin offering search engine marketing services instead of Search Engine Optimization.

In the middle of the 1990s, most people felt that the only thing you needed to succeed was a website. For some people, this was the truth. By the end of the 1990s, template software was invented. Programs like Dreamweaver and Frontpage made it easier for people who weren't programmers to build their own websites. Once more people begin building their own websites, they next wanted to optimize those sites. To meet this demand, companies started developing software which made it easy for people to design their own websites. To stay competitive, website designers had to change the type of services they offered.

It is now common to use a website which can be edited. CMS has allowed a number of different elements to be automatically generated. Some of these elements include Meta tags, page names, and page titles. Site maps are also being automatically generated. Many experts believe that this is the next stage of SEO technology because they've designed these very programs for their own clients. Once a customer understands how to properly optimize their pages, they will get ahead of those who do not. While SEO is a great service to offer today, it will begin to diminish in importance as more people use the internet and learn how to optimize their own pages without paying a company to do it for them.

At this point, SEO firms will naturally want to shift their attention towards search engine marketing services. This industry will be the replacement for the SEO industry that we see today. If you get into this growing industry now, you and your firm will prosper in the next five years.

Search Engine Ranking Tips & Tricks

Written By: Trevor A. Winchell - Gooyah Search Founder

The effect of outgoing links on your web site

While most webmasters are aware that incoming links are important to the success of a web site, many site owners don't know that outgoing links also have an impact on their web sites.

Outgoing links influence search engines

The web pages to which you link form the "neighborhood" of your web site. If you link to spammy web sites then search engines might think that your web site is also spam.
Links to link farms and automated linking systems can actually hurt your Google rankings. For that reason, it is important that you take a look at the quality of a web site before you link to it.

Outgoing links influence web site visitors

The web sites to which you link help your web site visitors to put your web site into a larger context. If you link to high quality sites with useful content, web surfers will associate your web site with these high quality sites.
If you link to other web sites show your web site visitors that your web site can be trusted. You wouldn't send visitors to other pages if they could find negative information about your products or services on other sites.
Links add value to your web site, they show your visitors that you have nothing to hide and that you have confidence in your site.

Give, and you shall receive

You do not lose visitors by offering links to other pages. Links to other pages will bring you more and repeat customers. All visitors will leave your web site sooner or later. No matter how great your web site is, no one will stay on your web site forever. The question is what web surfers do when they leave your site.

If you don't have outgoing links or if you hide your links, then you send your visitors back to search engines (which give you nothing in return). If you offer your web site visitors links, you can send leaving visitors to other web sites that can send you their visitors in return.

Carefully chosen links to outside resources can improve the experience of visitors who visit your web site. Give, and you shall receive. This is true for many aspects of life and it also works for web site promotion.

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Everything you need for successful website promotion

IBP offers everything you need to successfully promote your website. IBP is a proven suite of professional web promotion tools that helps you with all aspects of website promotion and search engine optimization.

Search engine optimization leads to higher profits for your business

More than 1 billion people have been using the Internet in 2005 (source: Nielsen/NetRatings). Web users spend twice as much time online as watching TV (Source: Stanford Institute for the Quantitative Study of Society). Consumers spent $143.2 billion online in 2005, 22 percent more than in 2004 (Source: ComScore).

A survey conducted by market research firm TNS revealed that 75% of all online shoppers said that company size was not a factor in having their online shopping needs satisfied. Only 15% said they preferred to shop with large retailers (source: TNS).

More than 80% of all Internet users find new websites through search engines (source: Georgia Tech/GVU Users Survey). That means that about 650 million people use search engines to find websites.

Search engine users are some of the most qualified and motivated visitors to your website you will ever have. After all, they have taken the initiative to hunt for online resources on a certain topic. Then they clicked your link to learn more.

IBP helps you to get your website in front of these potential customers. High search engine rankings result in more website visitors, more customers and more sales.

Can My Site Rank Well On All Four Major Engines?

Written By: Trevor A. Winchell - Gooyah Search Founder

One of the most frequently asked questions readers and clients email StepForth Placement's SEO staff, revolves around how websites can be best optimized to meet the algorithmic needs of each of the major 4 search engines, Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Though there have been wide sweeping changes in the organic search engine landscape over the past six months, the fundamental ways search engines operate remains the same.

This question, or variants on it, reflects a shared notion among some webmasters that SEO driven placements at one search engine might come at the expense of high rankings across the other search engines. As the thinking goes, the techniques used to make a well optimized website rank well at Google might somehow prevent that same site from achieving high rankings at Yahoo, MSN and/or Ask. Alternately, webmasters and advertisers who already have great placements at Google but not at the others appear wary of sacrificing their Google rankings in pursuit of higher placements on Yahoo, MSN or Ask.

The differences between how each engine works appears to be causing a bit of confusion among webmasters and search marketers, especially regarding how to optimize well for all four at the same time.

Techniques that work on one engine might not work as well on another. In some extreme cases, techniques that work brilliantly with old school engines like MSN and Ask, and even with the invigorated Yahoo, are a kin to a kiss of death on Google.

There is one search engine friendly site design and optimization philosophy that works, almost every time, without fail. Good content, smart networking, and persistence over time. A well constructed website, or one that has been treated by a good search engine optimizer, should be able to rank well on all major search engines, provided that site has useful, relevant information to express.

Questions about ranking well on all four engines brings up some of the basic differences between the major search engines and, in light of so much change in the sector over the past few months, a look at what search engines look at, and how they do it seems in order.

There are a lot of differences between the major search engines but, by and large, they all gather information the same way. Each major search engine uses unique spider agents known as Googlebot, Slurp (Yahoo/Inktomi), Ask.com/Teoma, and MSNbot, (updated list @ Wikipedia ), that find information by following links from document to document across the web. Spiders are designed to revisit sites on a semi-regular basis as well, though they often hit the index (or home) page more often than other pages. Spiders do tend to dig deeper looking for changes to internal documents based on changes to the index (or home) page. This allows the engines to maintain rapidly updating versions of the web, or parts of the web, in separate proprietary databases.

Each search database has its own characteristics and most importantly, each engine has its own algorithms for sorting and ranking web documents.

Getting information into those databases is the first stage of SEO. The site needs to be constructed (or reconstructed) in such a way as to allow search spiders to easily read and absorb the information and content contained on them.

Assuming realistic expectations and goal setting are already part of the equation, the success or failure of any multi-engine optimization campaign is dependent on the type of site being marketed, as much as it depends on methods and techniques used to market it. If the ultimate goal is strong search engine placements across all major search engines, a few compromises in style might be a temporary necessity in order to expose the great content and reap the rewards of multiple rankings.

Before beginning the building or construction of a site, having a working knowledge of the major on and off-site elements each search engine looks at when examining and evaluating a site and its contents is a key starting point.

There are two overarching areas all search engines examines when ranking a web document or site known as "on-page" and "off-page". As their names indicate, search engines examine factors and elements that occur on the document or site in question as well as factors and elements occurring on other documents and sites related by links or by topical theme.

While the search algorithms of each engine might differ in the number of factors found on or off page and the overall importance of those factors, they all examine generally similar sets of data when deciding which should rank where in relation to whatever search-queries are entered.

For example, Google loves links, as does Yahoo, MSN and to a lesser degree, Ask. MSN and Ask are considered to be old school search engines, allowing simpler SEO techniques to work quite well, as they still do with Yahoo.

On-page factors are generally found in one of four areas, Titles, Tags, Text and Structure, while off-page elements tend to involve links, locality, search-user behaviours and the performance of competing sites.

Here is a thumbnail breakdown the most important factors each search engine considers, roughly laid-out in order of importance.

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Google: Incoming Links, On-page SEO, Site Design Spiderability, User analytics, Outgoing links, Inclusion in other Google indexes, Document Histories

Yahoo: On-page SEO, Links and Link Patterns, Site Design, User analytics, Inclusion in other Yahoo indexes, Document Footprints

MSN: On-page SEO, Site Design and Structure and Sipderability

Ask: On-page SEO, Site Design, Site Structure and Spiderability

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Because Google drives approximately 50% of all organic search traffic, SEOs, webmasters, and search advertisers tend to be most concerned with Google placements. When planning a search optimization campaign, whether for a new site or in the redevelopment of an existing site, building around Google's needs is obviously the most logical path. It is also a smart way to find your way into the other search engines. Though each of the rival engines want to present the best possible results, Google's algorithms account for quality scoring to a deeper degree than the others do. In other words, if your site meets Google's various tests, it will likely meet those of the other engines.

Google puts an enormous weight on its evaluation of the network of links leading to and out from every web document in its index. Most, if not all, documents found in Google's index got there because Google's spider Googlebot found it by following an inbound link. Because its ranking algorithm is so heavily link dependent, Google is frequently forced to tinker with how it evaluates links, a process that generates a score known as PageRank. The basic wisdom on links says that incoming links from topically relevant sites are beneficial while those placed in order to get a better ranking at Google are not. Google also examines links on a document or site that are directed towards other sites in order to gauge if a webmaster is trying to game it or not by participating in link-networking schemes. To one degree or another, the three other major search engines do this as well, though MSN and Ask are not known for using link analysis as a weighty measure of site or document relevancy. Yahoo most certainly does. Link analysis is used to determine the seriousness and credibility of a web document by comparing it with other documents it is associated with.

Once a document exists in a search engine database, several on-page factors are examined. The engines tend to examine several elements of any particular document and the sites they are associated with including title, meta tags (in some cases), body text and other content, and internal site structure.

Google and Googlebot Information CodeWords

Written By: Trevor A. Winchell - Gooyah Search Founder

We often get asked by prospective and new clients about Googlebot, such as, "how they know if its been to their site", and so on. Therefore, we've designed this FAQ section to answer some of the more common questions.

1. How do I get listed in Google?
2. What's the name of The Google Spider.
3. What's the difference between Deepbot and Freshbot?
4. How do I know if Freshbot and/or Deepbot have visited my site?
5. What's the actual name for Googlebot showing in the logs?
6. How do I know if my site has been spidered by Google?
7. How do I know which spider (Freshbot or Deepbot) has visited my site if my log analysis reports don't tell me?
8. Googlebot has been to my pages what happens then?
9. How do I know if my site has been indexed by Google?
10. It has been a few days since Googlebot visited but I'm still not showing up in the results pages - Why?
11. My site uses dynamic pages. How can I get it indexed in Google?
12. What if my site is unavailable for Googlebot?
13. What other issues will cause my site to not be indexed by Google?
14. Can I block Googlebot from indexing my site?

All the answers to the questions above are listed below.

1. How do I get listed in Google?
Go to this page and request that your site be added. We recommend only submitting the index of a properly linked site and letting Google find your pages on its own. If for some reason you feel that Google will not index your site properly, then we recommend submitting your sitemap page as well.

2. What is the name of The Google Spider?
Google calls its spider "Googlebot". Googlebot comes in two flavors: Deepbot and Freshbot.

3. What's the difference between Deepbot and Freshbot?
Both spiders have specific tasks, as you may have guessed by their names. Freshbot is the spider you hope to see more often. It looks for fresh content on a site. It is not uncommon for Freshbot to visit a site many times a day. Deepbot is responsible for the really deep crawling. Generally when you see search results change, it is because Deepbot has been active. Deepbot is responsible for thoroughly crawling a site and attempting to build a complete picture, or matrix, of the site; how the site is interlinked and how its navigation affects its usability. Deepbot uses data gathered by Freshbot as well as its own results to build a picture of your site.

4. How do I know if Freshbot and/or Deepbot have visited my site?
Generally you can tell by the spider's IP address. Deepbot uses IPs that start with 216, while Freshbot uses IPs that start with 64. In other words, a Deepbot IP would resemble 216.239.45.4 while a Freshbot IP could include 64.208.32.4.

5. What's the actual name for Googlebot showing in the logs?
Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html). This appears for both Freshbot and Deepbot.

6. How do I know if my site has been spidered by Google?
The easiest way is to do a search for Googlebot (http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html) in your logfile. It may not appear in the "spiders" section of your log analysis tool, however, as it tends to emulate a browser instead. Therefore, if you are using a log analysis tool like WebTrends, look in the "browsers" section of the report.

7. How do I know which spider (Freshbot or Deepbot) has visited my site if my log analysis reports doesn't tell me?
You will likely need to look at the raw log files to see which spider visited. If you perform a search in the file for "Googlebot" then look for the IP address. It will be in the ranges listed above.

8. Googlebot has been to my pages, so what happens next?
Generally, you can expect your site to start showing up in the search results in a short time. Google makes no guarantees when or even if your site will be included in the index.

9. How do I know if my site has been indexed by Google?
If you have noticed the Googlebot appearing in your log files, the easiest way to see if you have been indexed by Google is to perform a search for your site. Simply search for your site (i.e. www.mysite.com or mysite.com) and see if your pages show up.

10. It has been a few days since Googlebot visited but I'm still not showing up in the results pages - Why?
Generally, it takes more than a few days to show up in the index. We recommend waiting at least 1 month as Google usually regularly updates its index in this timeframe. If it has been more than two months, there may be other issues which affect your site's ability to be indexed. As mentioned above, Google makes no guarantees when, or even if, your site will show up in the search results pages. Go to this page on the Google site to see reasons why your site may not be indexed. Aside from Google deciding not to list your site, there are other issues which could have affected your being indexed.

11. My site uses dynamic pages. How can I get it indexed in Google?
Google does index dynamic sites on its own. The problem will be that it won't rank them highly. If all you are concerned with is getting into the index, then you are ok. If you want to rank well for key phrases though, you should consider alternatives other than a dynamic URL system to display your site.

12. What if my site is unavailable when Googlebot visits?
Generally, both Deepbot and Freshbot will make repeated attempts to access your site before moving on. Therefore, it's recommended that your site be available for a majority of the time. If you were indexed in Google, then were removed because your site was unavailable, we recommend waiting at least a month to see if you get reindexed. Many times Google will remove an inaccessible site, to keep its results relevant, then will reinstate the site when the site is available again.

13. What other issues will cause my site to not be indexed by Google?
There can be many things, aside from your site not being available, which could cause Googlebot to exclude your site from the current crawl and index. There are many server issues which could affect ranking as well as design issues and other issues which make it difficult to index the site.

14. Can I block Googlebot from indexing my site?
While we do not recommend this in any situation, unless you thoroughly understand how to write this file, you may feel the need to block all or part of your site from spiders. Through the use of a file called robots.txt you can exclude specific files and folders from being included in the index. You can even block your whole site from being indexed, therefore, you should only employ this file when you are sure you have it configured properly.

If you have any other question feel free to email me trevor@gooyah.net