Academia Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for academics and those enrolled in higher education. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
I recently create a new google sites-powered webpage for my academic page (after seeing discussions at this question and others).
However, being a brand new page, it won't come up at all if you search for my name (even with qualifiers such as 'math' or my institution).
What steps should I take to ensure that others can find my website?
I am specifically looking for answers that apply to academic pages, as I've heard that they may be indexed in a different way from normal webpages.
The usual approach would be to create links to the website from other prominent indexed websites. So for example, you might want to create a link to the page from your university profile page. You could also add links from ResearchGate, LinkedIn and other social networks that allow you to share a link to a personal website. You could start creating content and sharing it on social networks.
Then, you just have to wait a bit for the web crawlers (particularly Google) to find and index you. This might take a month or more.
If you are specifically interested in being indexed by Google Scholar, check out these guidelines:
Individual Authors
If you're an individual author, it works best to simply upload your paper to your website, e.g., www.example.edu/~professor/jpdr2009.pdf; and add a link to it on your publications page, such as www.example.edu/~professor/publications.html. Make sure that:
the full text of your paper is in a PDF file that ends with ".pdf", the title of the paper appears in a large font on top of the first page, the authors of the paper are listed right below the title on a separate line, and there's a bibliography section titled, e.g., "References" or "Bibliography" at the end. That's it! Our search robots should normally find your paper and include it in Google Scholar within several weeks.
If it doesn't work, you could either (1) read more detailed technical guidelines in this documentation or (2) check if your local institutional repository is already configured for indexing in Google Scholar, and upload your papers there.
You don't have to do anything, it takes a couple of weeks for search engines to index your website. There is no difference between academic website and normal website in the way they are indexed.
To ensure that others can find your website, do awesome research and publish excellent papers. Otherwise, no matter how many SEO techniques you do, nobody will care.
Often times, new websites will find themselves in the "Google Sandbox."
This means that you won't see your website showing up in search results for upwards of six months (as some studies have suggested). However, do not be dismayed by this. Keep adding content, Google will still see it ... and rank your site accordingly when the time comes.
As it were, if you are interested in moving away from the Google-site, and to WordPress (which is MUCH better), there is a pretty good guide here: Building Your Personal Academic Website
Since this question by the OP has come back to current search results, I will say that the better approach is to use your own domain name to be found.
Part of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) practices is to put links from social media or other reputable websites to your website. Nevertheless, when searched directly for your practices or name, you have control on your own website how you want to be found.
There are a number of ways on how you can manipulate search engines to make your site come up above other websites and pretty fast actually. Even if you link yourself from an academia page to your original website, this will hierarchically be higher on the scale than the person being found in-between pages of another page. But again, there are rules to be followed such as meta-tags, getting your website approved by Google, going to the Google console and submitting a request to be indexed by robots and other SEO practices.
