Launching a new site and getting it indexed

Arguably one of the most important steps in the SEO process of a new project is how one gets the site indexed for the first time. As always, making a good first impression is important, and the universally accepted way to do it is to acquire a high-value link pointing to the index page of the new site, from a highly relevant, related and possibly well-crawled source. That’s the way it has always been done and that’s the way you should still aim to do it, if the search engines will allow you to that is. What am I talking about? A while ago, I launched a new website which has been on the back-burner for quite a while, featuring good content of course, but only a handful of pages, as it’s always advisable to get your site online as soon as possible, adding relevant pages to it later as work moves along.

Anyway, the deal was that the site was pushed online while everyone involved was busy with other projects. We expected it to just sit around gathering dust for a couple of weeks before someone could get around to link it up for indexing and for the initial phase of the SEO process.

A couple of days after it went online, we were all surprised to see it got indexed and crawled by Google, without anyone ever knowing about it and without any kind of backlinks posted whatsoever. How exactly did this happen? None of the other search engines followed suit, and Google has only indexed the homepage, none of the internals. Still, there are no backlinks whatsoever pointing back towards the site, yet Googlebot shows up everyday and moseys around the site as if looking for new bits and pieces of information.Has the way new websites are being indexed changed? If so, how does Google sniff out new websites these days if it no longer relies on backlinks?

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