Indexing and the Internet

There are approximately 700,000 new pages added to the Internet world wide every minute. Google has indexed somewhere in the neighborhood of .004% of the Internet after seven years of nonstop searching! Those search engines run 24 hours a day, every day. Google has said that if the Internet came to a halt and no new information was added it would take about 300 years to catch up! Just that fact itself tends to put getting indexed squarely in the realm of being a miracle.

Anyone who has written anything on the Internet knows indexing is important. If it isn't indexed it isn't read! After all if it doesn't pop up in a search, how will the reader find it?

URL's (www.whateveryoururlis) are the address where your article can be found. If you enter the URL address to your article in one of the search boxes for Google, MSN, yahoo, etc, the article should show up in the results, and the link should take you to your article page. If it does not show up in the results, then you have not been indexed, which in turn means anyone searching on the topic you wrote about is not going to find your work.

Posting a link to your page's URL on social networking sites like Face Book, Twitter, or My Space may increase your chances of being indexed by a search engine. Linking to it from a blog or another website, as long as the search engines regularly crawl those sites will eventually get you indexed.

Having a few links on the Internet increases the chances that your article will be indexed, but it does not guarantee it! It depends on how much Google juice the site has and how the article was written.

Keyword abuse or embedding invisible text can get you banned by a search engine.

Good SEO (search engine optimization) and LSI (latent semantic indexing) technique can only help get the article noticed.

If the site you are writing for adds information to the URL, like Associated Content does, you will need to delete the URL extras back to the actual address. AC likes to add (?cat= and a number) at the end for their own use and that confuses the issue, simply delete back until only html is at the end of your url and press enter on the search box.

It is possible to become indexed to the website, blog, or networking site you linked from instead of your actual article. Hang on and give it a few days and it should straighten itself out and index correctly, but keep an eye on it to be sure that it does.

It is not possible to directly input your article to a search engine, although there is a function that appears that way, it is actually to submit the entire website and can also get you banned for abuse, never a good thing.

How does a search engine pick out an article for indexing or refuse it? This is actually a well kept secret as to the particulars, and many are the web pages dedicated to the subject. Proper writing, the use of SEO, LSI, grammar, are a given. Keyword density used to be, but isn't anymore.

There are always people trying to scam the search engines, and there are always techs programming in a new way to stop them. The search engines themselves are evolving into smarter more efficient machines that someday may be able to tell at a glance what people are actually looking for, and how good the content is, but for now all we can do is try our best to write well and do our best to get indexed.

References:
www.pingdom.com/2009/01/22/internet-2008-in-numbers/
www.wisegeek.com/how-big-is-the-internet.htm