My site (launched about a month ago) was allready indexed by google. I submit a sitemap.xml whenever I make changes or add pages. I added a new page about a week ago and google still hasn't indexed it, how long should it take? Also, when i do a site:mydomain I get wierd results. the list size keeps changing and sometimes shows 10 pages but when i start going trough the pages the number changes. anyone else noticed this behaviour?
Depends how many backlinks you have, try setting the crawl rate in webmaster tools to the max. I bought a new domain last week and already have 170 pages indexed. About the page thing, yes, sometimes it displays 10 pages and then u click on like 5 and it only shows like 4 total pages, etc.
u can expedite indexing process by social bookmarking your pages to popular social bookmarking sites.
It all depends based on the authority of your website. I have two websites, one of them has more than 500 pages indexed, but won't get any SE traffic, but the other one has more number of pages, but the indexed number is less than 200 and still gets a considerably good SE traffic, and site:domain.com thing is common and normal behavior of Google.
thanks for the answers guys. If the new page is submitted in sitemap.xml does it still matter how many backlinks my website has?
Its utterly depends upon the back link you making to the page. Do make quality back links to your new page to get crawled by google soon.
Normally a new page gets indexed within 2 hours to 2 week. This also depends upon the power of your domain. New pages on domains with high PR and lots of backlink gets indexed quickly while new pages on new domains takes time.
Make use of the Google Webmaster tools to get your website indexed faster. Sitemaps are a great deal in that regards, too.
I agree, use Google Webmaster tools. Easily crawled by search engine. Also make quality backlinks from off-page optimization, to increaseyour website traffic .
your sitemap.xml should automatically update itself... you should have it under your hosting client or have something like wordpress build it for you... Big G usually take 1-2 months to start indexing your site... it just takes some time.
You can submit an xml sitemap for your site to google in Google webmaster tools and it will then tell you to add a small line of html code into the header of your site's source code (to prove it's your site before they start giving you information about it.) You can then tell them when you've put the code in there, they then go to the site in the next couple of days to check that you have indeed put the code in there, and boom, your site is indexed.
This happens to everyone, google will show you a sample from the index pages when someone searches for site:sitename.tld. just make sure to ping the search engines whenever you add or update a page rest will be updated with them really fast.