Use Google Sitemaps to Help With Reinclusion Requests

A client does not have any of her website’s pages in Google’s index. What to do? It can seem daunting, but the following 4 steps can lead to a satisfactory conclusion.

1. Create an account with Google sitemaps so you can begin the process of asking them why your site is not indexed. The Google sitemaps function will point out problems with the website that prevent Google from spidering the pages:

(http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/about.html)

2. Place a new Google site maps page inside your web directory. It needs to be in the root directory and it needs to be named with an .html extension. When you activate your Google site maps account, part of the process will give you a unique .html page that must be created and placed in your website. There are other methods to verify your website but this is the one I chose for ease of implementation.

3. Point Google to your sitemap.xml page within your website's root directory after it has been created and uploaded to the root directory of your website.

4. Submit a Reinclusion request of your website at Google's Reinclusion page:

(http://www.google.com/support/bin/request.py)

These are the bare-bones steps. But Google’s sitemaps page has detailed instructions that will walk you through the process.

This process also anticipates some of the steps Google will want you to take to find out for yourself why your website is not being indexed and what you can do for Google to assist it in finding your pages.

Warren Taylor - Senior Account Executive