How do website pages gets indexed by the search engines?

Question

How do website pages gets indexed by the search engines?

Does this depends on number of times the page is visited?

I have a site whose default page got indexed but not the other pages which are at the same level as that of default!

Answer 1

See this wiki article

Index (search engine)

Answer 2

Some tips from Google about their search analyzes your website. Google Search Basics

Answer 3

Are your other pages linked to from the default page? If not then the search engines won't be able to find them. You could try uploading an XML sitemap through Google Webmaster Tools.

Answer 4

Usually, search engines takes some time to index all the pages in your site (days to weeks). Some pages are indexed early, while others are index later.

Make sure that all the pages can be seen from the default page by having links to them (directly or indirectly).

You can also submit a sitemap to search engines in order to help them learn about your site structure. (in Google, for example, you can use Webmasters Tools to do that).

Answer 5

Typically webpages are discovered by the search engine. This happens when other sites, that are already indexed, contain a link to your site, and the search engine then finds your site through theirs. Another way is to suggest to the search engine by filling out an addition form. I remember you use to be able to do this with Yahoo and Google.

Here is a link to add a site to google.

Answer 6

Does this depends on number of times the page is visited?

No.

It depends on how many links there are to the page, and also how much relevant information there is to index on the page.

I have a site whose default page got indexed but not the other pages which are at the same level as that of default!

That's because you don't have any links from your default page to the other pages. If you have some fancy navigation that doesn't use links, the crawlers can't find the pages.

Links to other pages has to be proper links. If you want a fancy navigation you should also offer the links as an alternative. The search engine crawlers needs them, and it also helps people who are not able to use the fancy navigation for some reason.

Making a site map also helps crawlers to identify which pages are most relevant to index.

Answer 7

Rule #1: Patience. There are billions of web pages out there, with probably millions being created every day. It takes time for search engines to index pages.

As for the how: a search engine follows links from other pages to your page (say, the home page). Then it will follow links from that page to other pages and so on. You can add your site manually as someone else said, but the best way to be indexed quickly is to gain as many links as you can from various sources (ethically, of course). One is enough, but SEs will index 'popular' pages more quickly.

Make sure your links are normal HTML links, i.e. like <a href="page.html">page</a> and not generated by JS or Flash. On your home page you should at least link to all your main top level pages/categories.

You can check your progress by doing a search for site:yourdomain.com. Note that indexed pages may not show up straight away as changes need to be rolled out across all data centres.