So, anyone know anything about Google?

[Master Kenzo]

Well, I was bored today, so I tried searching for my website "inner-realmz" in Google. The first thing that came up was some age-old threads here at CAA, and the old version of my website below. So I was wondering, do the Google bots randomly find your site and add it to their engine, or is there something you have to sign up for?

I bet no one'll see this either

[ShiroiHikari]

I dunno, I've been wondering this myself...maybe you have to get a lot of hits?

[inkhana]

I have this trouble with my website. The old version always comes up high in the google results, even though I've redirected all the traffic to the new site. All I can figure is it has to do with the number of times it encounters the URL or something when indexing sites...I really don't know.

[blkmage]

Gah, my site isn't even on there. There are a bunch of links to some of my accounts at various places, but my site isn't among them, even though all of my accounts link to my site. And of course, there are numerous imposter blkmages.

[Jester]

Google has a very nasty and annoying habit of automatically picking up forums sometimes. It's roughly random, but irritating as it can clog up searches sometimes.

[Master Kenzo]

I've also noticed the views on certain threads MUCH higher than the posts...is that Google or just people too shy to post?

[Bobtheduck]

You have to submit your site to google. The reason it picks up forum threads is due to it scanning all of the submitted sites for links. When it finds links on the sites that are submitted, the new sites (found through links) are added to the list as well, and then they are subsequently scanned as well. The only way your site will ever get on google is if you submit it yourself or you are linked to on someone who IS on google.

[Master Kenzo]

So, technically, if I posted my website here in this thread, it would show up in Google?

http://www.innerrealmz.com

Let's try.

[Psycho Ann]

I'm not exactly sure how google works as well, but for it to pick up keywords from forums is sometimes satisfying to my morbid curiousity on just how much trash talk is going on behind my back. *lol* XD

[JediSonic]

The only time my site was well-ranked on google was when nehe.gamedev.net had a link to it on the homepage and I got like 900 hits ^^

[Mithrandir]

My final fantasy 8 walkthrough was the top search on google. From what I understand, google has a back end system that keeps track of:
1. Keywords.
2. Entry points.
3. History of clicks.

An entry point is a link to your site from somewhere else. For example, if you have a link here on CAA, it's possible it will be make your rank higher on your site. In my case, so many sites linked to my site, that it jumped up that high. Also, people clicked on that link really frequently, so that probably helped. I haven't looked at google since I rebuilt my website, though, so I assume I am no longer the top hit.

[Kaligraphic]

They usually just find stuff by having someone else link to it. Google also incorporates the Open Directory Project (dmoz) listings, and will quickly pick up links from there. As for the Google cache, Google checks the contents of pages on a monthly cycle, and essentially re-scans the web each month. If your site ranks low on Google's priority, you can even miss out on the month's crawl to other sites, and find the Google cache several months out of date. As for the threads, Google only caches according to links, so the threads were probably linked during a previous crawl, and came up according to the text in them. (Google tries to parse any text on a page, and has a sometimes-working relevancy algorithm - I still get too many results that end up being search engines, though.)

Basically, get into dmoz or get a link from somewhere popular, and you'll get into Google's listings.