Why is your website not listed in the search engines?

First you have to remember, search engines are their own business and asking them why your not listed on their site is like them asking you why you don't have them listed on your website. Its your site and you put up what you want.

You also must understand, they have automated systems that can remove or exclude your site for any reason just because they want to.

Understand the process:

Normally they will not list a site in the first 3 months after buying a domain. If you site is listed before 90 days, consider yourself lucky.

When they finally do list the website, only the home page will be listed, generally for another 3 months.

If the site has been open for the full six months and has been available to the search crawler each time it has visited your website, then it will index a handfull of pages inside the website. When the pages are first listed, they will not be cached in the search database. But after several more crawls, usually 3-6 weeks, if the pages have text rich content the search engine will save the information on the page and add that page to its database.

Over the next year, more and more pages are added and your site will gradually see more and more visitors.

Can you speed up this process? NO. There is no way to speed this up. They use this system to prevent massive amount of spam sites poping up and filling their database with useless pages.

If you have a well built site with 500+ items in your shopping cart, after 1 year you wll likely see 200-500 pages listed in the major search engines. Then you can expect some traffic to your website.

Other Considerations:

The search engines are dealing with a certain amount of hard drive space. Although it is huge, it is also full. So for them to add your page, they have to remove 1 page.

If you sell widgets, and 9 million other sites sell widgets, they wont remove a current website to add yours, unless a site is closed, pages have been removed or they have added more space. So the time it takes to list a website is totally dependant on what all other websites are doing.

Recently google added 4 billion pages to their hard drive. The day before they did, those 4 billion pages were not listed, and would never have been with out a serious hardware upgrade costing tens of millions of dollars.

So when you ask, why is my page not listed, remember there are a billion more people asking the same question.

We always tell people, don't count on search traffic. If you get any, its icing on the cake. But with out a good advertising campaign, you wont have people going to your website. At least not for the first year.