Here at Logical Expressions, we’ve written quite a bit about how you can optimize the code in your Web site to make it search engine friendly. If you already have a Web site, however, getting your site listed in the search engines has become increasingly difficult. Google is especially problematic about listing or “indexing” new sites.
As an example, a reader wrote to me and said that he moved a Web site from one ISP to another, which changed his Web site domain name. He dutifully submitted the new site address to Google, but even after two years, searches in Google only show pages from the old site because Google hasn’t visited and indexed the new one.
As described by Google itself (http://www.google.com/technology/) in addition to scanning the text in your site, the search engine relies on a concept called PageRank to deliver relevant search results. Your site’s Page Rank is determined by how "popular" it is, which relates to many links you have coming into your site from other sites Google has deemed important. So in a perfect world, you’d have lots of high Page Rank sites linking to your site.
In other words, to get indexed by Google you need to have incoming links to your site. The Google crawler then follows these links into your site and indexes it. If you can get incoming links from sites with a high Page Rank, your odds are even better.
Unfortunately, getting new sites indexed is a lot harder than it used to be. There is a theory that Google allegedly has an extra filter that it places on new sites. Termed the "Google Sandbox," some people believe this holding area keeps sites from getting good rankings for certain highly competitive keywords. Assuming the sandbox is real, it’s a good reason to keep the same domain for your site. For example, our LogicalExpressions.com site has a page rank of 6. I believe that some of this ranking comes from the fact that it has been in the same place since 1997.
Whether or not a "sandbox" exists, it’s irrelevant if Google can’t read your site in the first place. As I intimated earlier, being listed by Google also depends on how the site is coded. I’ve seen some sites that are so search-engine hostile that Google just hits it and moves on. If Google can’t read anything because the site is all Javascript, Flash or convoluted code, you’re outta luck.