How much must I panic?

[andrewkeet]

Hello.

Three week old site, googlebot been quite a few times but only the index page returned for site:domain search. This has never happened to me before. Is this some sort of penalty ?

Thank you in advance.

[Jeremy80]

No I doubt it is a penalty. Sometimes it just takes some time to get fully indexed. It may help to submit a sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools. Another thing that may help is to build some backlinks to pages throughout your website. Three weeks isn't much time for a new website though. So just be patient.

[Dubbya]

If the sitemap has been submitted and you're not seeing any errors in Google Webmaster Tools, there's little you can do but wait.

If you see any errors, if you find any "no-index" meta tags or if your robots.txt file is restricting Googlebot, get those things fixed asap.

Meanwhile, keep acquiring inbound links and add some content every few days. Keep submitting your sitemap with every update.

Hang in there. It took one of my sites 3 months before it was ranking well, but that's in an extremely competitive niche where spammers are rampant.

.02

[ajaibs]

Do you see any errors in Google webmaster tools? Three weeks is nothing. One of my site Google adds new pages a week. Its been 2-3 months now. Looks like Google indexing is not as fast as it used to be.

[intelinside]

I don't think you need to panic at this moment.

3 weeks is not a lot of time for G to index a new site. I would suggest that you keep tracking your 'crawl stats' in webmaster tools and you will surely get indexed in days to come.

However, make sure that your server is up and running especially when G bot pays a visit

[trafficschool]

newbie question here- how can I check if google bot has visited my site?

[earnest]

My answer will be as follows: whatever happens, do not panic Anyway yours would not qualify as a panic case.

[texxs]

Isn't this called the "sandbox"?

[texxs]

Originally Posted by trafficschool

newbie question here- how can I check if google bot has visited my site?

Check your Stats. It should have a list of "crawlers" or "bots" that have visited your site and how many times.

If your you have a Cpanel based interface for hosting management, use the "Awstats" option.

also you could ad should visit google's webmasters tools section. they'll tell you the last time they've visited the site. If it's never you can tell it to go visit it now. submit a sitemap.xml while you're at it.

[trafficschool]

thanks texxs