Does Google Like Your Site? There’s a Way to Find Out

Josh McCoy’s recent article on SearchEngineWatch.com, "What Google Thinks of Your Site," answers a question that many website owners wonder about their link building program. Fortunately, says McCoy, Google itself provides you with everything you need to find out how your link building strategies are stacking up, literally, in the search engine rankings.

He first recommends analyzing your sitelinks. You can do this by searching any term that you know currently ranks you first. Optimally, you will see three to eight links that sync with your main navigation. Or, you might see links to deeper pages on your site.

Next, McCoy discusses internal links for your site – the horizontally placed links between the SERP listing description and URL for a search. To get Google to see those, make sure they’re used in the first few paragraphs of content on your page.

A third possibility is that you may see no sitelinks at all. This, McCoy says, is a sure sign that your site is "SEO unfriendly," and you need to do something about it. You wouldn’t be alone; as examples, McCoy sites both Pepsi and Coca-Cola as having sites that use Flash or Java-based home pages, which totally confuse search spiders.