I have just setup a new affiliate Website at www.value-hotels.co.uk that Google crawled through on the 11th August but it only indexed the homepage. I took great care when creating the site to use search engine friendly URLs and I also created a sitemap atwww.value-hotels.co.uk/sitemap so I dont understand why Google hasnt started crawling deeper into the site. I am now starting to try to build more links into the site, any more advice on what I need to do to get Google to crawl deeper into the site would be very much appreciated. Thanks, MM
Google will only index the home page of a site the first time it is crawled - that one of the reasons that people create subdomains for different pages instead of including them on the main site (this is a trick that spammers have been utilizing to get a lot of pages indexed very quickly.) Google will eventually index the rest of your site on subsequent crawls, but you will just have to wait. Once way to speed up the process is to get some deep links into the site from other sites (forums, directories, etc...)
Just purchase a few authority type links and you'll get indexed within a week. High powered links is what Google likes to crawl your site.
Yes I created a Google sitemap (XML format) and submited it. I have waited a few weeks now and Google has crawled the homepage 3 times but still not crawled any further into the site. I have also created a HTML sitemap to help the crawling at http://www.value-hotels.co.uk/sitemap But still Google doesnt seem to want to crawl the site. Any advice as to what is wrong here would be very much appreciated. MM
markymark05, I think you need to validate your web page. I also notice that your homepage is XHTML, not HTML - I don't know how well Google can parse this. It certainly won't like seeing errors in the code. Your XML Sitemap looks good - well done. You need to shorten your navigation list - perhaps group by country or letter first. This will help both the bots and your visitors. Your XHTML sitemap is way too big. If you rearrange your navigation to be heirarchical, then you won't need it. For example: Continent -> Country -> City. Hope that helps... Cryo.
Instead of paying for links... You could go frenzy in various forums and include your signature in all your posts. There are also various moderate-good free directories.