DU Google Search Guidelines and Tips

DU invested significant resources in purchasing the Google Search Appliance. This means that the technology driving search results at our institution is the best available. However, the DU Google search will do the best job of finding and ranking your pages if you follow the guidelines below. These recommendations will help get your pages ranked more accurately on external search engines (such as the internet Google) as well.

Ensuring that your content gets found

Each night, between midnight and 7:00 AM MST, the DU Google Appliance indexes DU content. It does this by "crawling" through online documents using a browser to follow links from specified starting points. Your content will NOT be found unless it meets both of the following criteria:

The content must be stored where DU Google is configured to crawl;
Your content must be reachable by following links from a starting point in the crawl (or be the starting url);

If your content is not being found, and you believe it should be, please contact the DU Google Administrator.

Optimizing your pages for better results/Ranking

Please visit the "Influencing search results and ranking" tips page for suggestions on how to improve the ranking of your pages in the DU Google results.

Hiding pages from DU Google

DU Google is setup to search most locations on the DU Web. But it is also setup to ignore a few specific sub-directories. Any directory named "work" (all lowercase) will be off limits to the internal search engine. We recommend that you setup a work directory where you house pages that are not yet ready for public viewing.

DU Google employs a "crawler" to create an index of pages linked to each other. So, any page that has never been linked to any other page on DU Web servers will not be found.

To ensure that a single page is never found, you can use the robots META tag with "noindex". Here's how: In the head of an html document type the following into the code:

<META NAME="robots" CONTENT="noindex">

Identifying why your efforts aren't rewarded instantly

DU Google periodically builds its own database of information about each page on the DU Web. With each search request, DU Google scours that database to return results. Building the database takes significant resources, which is why it's programmed to happen in the wee hours of the morning. When you add or change ranking factors you won't see the results until after the next crawl that indexes your page. The Google appliance crawls every night, but does not index every page every night. In general, most pages seem to get indexed twice a week.

Questions about DU Google Search?