During the sometimes-long wait to be included in Google, you naturally want to know when you've succeeded. (So you can run through the streets yelling, ?Google me! Google me!?) How do you know whether your site is in the Google index? Don't try searching for it with general keywords ? that method is hit-or-miss. You could search for an exact phrase located in your site's text (by putting quotes around the phrase), but if the phrase is not unique you could get tons of other matches. The best bet is to simply search for your URL. Make it exact, and include the www prefix. If you're searching for an inner page of the site, precision is likewise necessary, so remember to include the .htm or .html file extension if it exists. When adding a page to a site already in Google, be prepared for a long wait for it to appear, especially if you don't change your content often. If Google's spider checks your site during only its deep crawl and the timing is off, you could tap your fingers for about six weeks before seeing the new page in search results.



Getting into the index, improving your PageRank, advertising on Google, distributing other people's Google ads on your site, and other ways of building your online business through Google. So a section about rebuffing Google might seem counterproductive. But in the interest of covering all bases, here it is. Sometimes even publicity-hungry Webmasters want to keep Google away from certain parts of their business. Private pages designed for friends and semiprivate pages created for select visitors shouldn't be indexed for the world at large. Entire sites that are still under development while existing on the Web in a live state might best be excluded from Google. It's fairly easy to prevent Google from indexing an entire site or selected pages of a site even if the spider crawls your URL. You can prevent Google also from caching pages of your site, a process by which Google stores each indexed page on its servers. This section explains how to prevent Google from crawling and caching your site.

Deflecting the crawl .The key to deflecting Google's spider is the robots.txt file, also known as the Robots Exclusion Protocol. Google's spider understands and obeys this protocol. The robots.txt file is a short, simple text file that you place in the toplevel directory (root directory) of your domain server. (If you lease your Web space from your ISP, not from a dedicated Web host, you probably need administrative help in placing the robots.txt file.) .Create the robots.txt file in Notepad or another text editor, and transfer it as an ASCII text file. It's best not to use Microsoft Word or another word processor to create the robots.txt file. But if you do, remember to save it as a plain text file with the .txt file extension. Then make sure you transfer it to your server as a binary file, which is the default setting of many FTP (file transfer protocol) programs.