...disavowing is supposedly the same thing as adding the nofollow tag to links.

Ah I see where you've missed what I was saying. Disavow and nofollow are two different things. Just like nofollow has undisclosed benefits--especially when being links coming from highly trusted sites--disavow isn't as easily categorized as the stock description of nofollow.  Fundamentally they're different as well, nofollow is linking to something purposefully, but with the caveat that for search engines, this isn't a 100% normal link. They're still intentionally making the link.

Disavow on the other hand is basically saying, "Hey, this link you found pointing to us on this site that's TOTAL spam... we want nothing to do with it. Please don't ban us, and ignore those links."  In Disavow's use, ideally for the site trying to get rid of the link they'd be happier if it didn't exist. That's in contrast to a site intentionally creating a link to something, but nofollowing it.

The two or three main reasons I've ran into for sites not ranking for their own branded searches are...

1. The site has way too little content -- a couple of pages less than 200 characters per page.

2. The site is very new and in none of the Webmaster Tools

3. https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools

4. http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmaster

5. https://webmaster.yandex.com/

6. Or the brand is a generic word that is reasonably competitive.

As Sam mentioned above, with more details the community can get you a much more definitive and nuanced answer.  Within your social profiles make sure you're linking back to your site and if your site has a physical location make sure to optimize via local search as well.

I think the perspective is a little skewed on this... If you look at it form the angle of a link from a spammy site is a bad thing (hence the need to disavow), that includes the anchor text being bad too, even if it's targeted anchor text.  What I mean is if the site is considered spam and the link juice from it is negative, why wouldn't the logical conclusion be that the anchor text is not going to count as well, or even be a negative ranking factor for that anchor text.

Within the RFP I'd err on the side of caution (under promise - over deliver) and say that we're going to disavow X number of links and start targeting quality.  If by some strange reason you do get an anchor text boost some how, it's extra to the above board work you're doing moving forward.

The second example is talking about a new page that never existed before, i.e. new-example.html... So you created a wholly new page on your site. You see that it gets crawled, you go to Google to see if it gets indexed.

Again though, the lower your site's domain authority and trust, the higher chance of that site getting pages indexed slower, de-indexed, and not showing up in high in the rankings.

Remember my earlier suggestion video?  You're sweating the computer and details and minutiae way too much at the expense of doing what would really move the needle for optimization at your site's stage (getting reputable links from other domains).  Same goes with what you're doing with trying to block certain activity on your site. Normal user activity is getting messed up--Massimiliano and Travis' experience.

This is probably the best advice at this stage: instead of spending one more second on this Q/A thread and trying to see how many minutes transpired between your own changes and seeing them in Google, spend that time to go get 10 good links.  No need to even thank me. I'll take the silence as your newly enlightened bliss.

Yeup!  Indexing time varies.  You'll be able to tell the time between crawl and indexation by when Google shows your page version B in it's cache after you made changes from A, so if the 'example.html' page is already in Google's index you'll see this:

You make changes on a page, example.html (version A is now version B)Google crawls example.html (version B)
You check Google to see if example.html is version A or B in the cache
no?
no?
no?
no?
yes. That's how long it takes.

OR, you make a new page. It gets crawled. Checking if it's indexed... no, no, no, no, yes?! That's how long it takes.

Again, this time period varies and having a site with excellent domain strength and trust usually makes it a shorter time period.  It also tends to influence how many pages Google decides to keep in its index or show to users.  Pretty much everything gets better for a site the stronger its domain authority and trust are.

Ah, that answer really varies per website.  For example, if you're site is a major news site, Google's indexation is extremely fast, measured in seconds not days.  Even if you're not a news site, major sites (high domain authority) get crawled and indexed very rapidly. Since you're going to be testing your own changes you'll learn how long this takes for your particular site.

Great! Well you have lots of insights here. It sounds like you're ready to test in the near term, and build up the domain in the long term.  Good luck!

Hi Massimliano.  I would disagree with myself if I was talking about your site too... ;^)  But in this specific case, qjamba.com is a site that needs the fundamental quality of backlinks more so than it needs Teddy to write a bot that is constantly pinging Google in order to try and decipher the incremental on-site changes he's making.  I'm speaking to his need to prioritize that aspect of optimization.  Copying what an SEO does when creating a nonsensical site with gibberish words in order to test on-page optimization as purely as possible with a normal, public facing website is a bad idea.

Obviously on-page optimization is important, but again, in this specific example, Teddy isn't even discussing his keyword rankings, rather he was looking to go down an on-site optimization path that might make him more and more frustrated instead of bringing about much more positive results.  Cheers!

Thanks. There are two main parts to Google "figuring out" your site. One: indexation. That's been solved.  We know that you're getting indexed.  Two: ranking. Your site being so new and young, it's going to need backlinks and network growth to experience dramatic ranking changes.  If your menu isn't causing your site to be indexed poorly and your pages are being counted as unique enough, then you're ok now there as well.  The next most important step is getting your domain trust and authority up.

You're welcome Teddy. Something that goes undermentioned when SEOs run very precise tests on specific page side changes is that they're typically doing them on completely brand new domains with non-sense words and phrases because of the chance that their manipulations might get the site blacklisted.There's no loss to them if that happens other than unanswered questions. If the site does survive for a bit maybe they'll learn a few new insights.  This level of granular, on site testing isn't a practical method for legitimate, public facing sites.

When it comes to sites that serve a business function aside from testing possible granular ranking changes, you're going to be much better served by measuring your changes against your user interaction instead of your search engine rankings. In that vein, design and test for the users on your site, not the search engines. If your site is getting visits but none of your business goals are being met, go nuts on testing those factors. Split test, iterate, and improve things with the focus of better conversions. Dive deep into services like Optimizely and research by the likes of Conversion Rate Experts.  Use focus groups and usability testing to see how the minutiae of your changes affects interaction. You can go as extreme as you want to in that regard.

Most importantly, the bulk of search engine ranking strength comes from external factors: the number and variety of sites linking to your site, the quality of sites linking to your site, the trust and high reputation of sites linking to your site, the semantic agreement of sites linking to your site, etc.  These factors are going to have many times greater influence in your ranking than your onsite tweaks in most cases.  If your site is functional and complies with Google's own guidelines (http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en//webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf) you've covered the bulk of what you need to do on site.  Focus instead on off site factors.

The site: search function exists mostly to provide searchers the ability to find a piece of information on a given domain. For example, let's say a reporter wants to cite an NBA stat from NBA.com, they'd use "stat thing" site:nba.com as a search.  For users, that's useful in searching specifics, and for Google that makes them look all the better at "categorizing the world's information."  Cache demonstrates the amount of information Google has archived and how quickly it's available. Back in the day--story time--Google used to advertise how quickly and how broadly they indexed things.  In fact, they still do!  If you look at a search result you'll notice a light gray statistic at the very top that says something like, "About 125,000,000 results (0.50 seconds)" for a search about hot dogs for example.  This is Google saying, "We're BIG and FAST." The precise details of your site are way down the list to Google's own story of being big and fast.

If you focus your efforts in off site optimization, linking with other reputable sites, and building your network you'll be way better served because you'll be getting referral traffic as well as lift in Google.  Cheers!

I would caution against creating a tool to do what you're describing as you might end up violating Google's terms of use.  Instead, use a dedicated tool for monitoring rankings--like Moz's pro feature set--around a specific set of keywords that have value for you instead of each and every page on your site.  Chasing after the immediate effect of ranking and changes is akin to trying to precisely unravel Google's ranking algorithm, something Google very much doesn't want you to do.  Instead look at past performance of content (analytics, server logs, etc.) and whether or not it improves after changes.  The improvement is also subjective.  Maybe you get less users and sessions, but much higher conversions...

Within GWT you're going to want to look at Index Status https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/index-status? and compare it with the number of pages in your sitemap(s).  This most likely isn't going to be an exact match as Google at times limits the amount it caches and indexes a site based on its own determination of page worthiness (high percentage of the page is duplicate content for example).  So look for a decent percentage of indexation versus exacting numbers.  Also, having pages that perform really well for you indexed and ranking well is more important that 100 that don't.

Ultimately the more precisely you try to deconstruct Google the more difficult things will be. Take old Ben's advice, "Let go..."

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I think one of the best takeaways from Rand's work with Conversion Rate Experts is the understanding Rand got from talking about his services in person and how well such conversations "converted" versus how Moz was talking about what it did and offered on the site.  For your specific case the solution is probably somewhat similar, how would you first describe and introduce your product (home page, very well crafted)  and then how you would address specific examples and use cases (blog post, referencing your core service) or other pages.

Home pages can often rank for a robust set of terms so you might be alright in ranking with the smaller site format, still spend the time going through your Analytics carefully to see what pages you should keep and redesign versus what pages you could most likely redirect to the higher converting new ones.  Also, test test test. Make sure you're making improvements with the changes you're making. Optimizely should be able to help you in that regard: https://www.optimizely.com/statistics

If you're very local, spending time seeing how your referrals and leads arrive via sites like Yelp, Google Local and others would be good too.  It sounds like you're on the right track though and just need to tie things together with Analytics.

The "site:" operator isn't as precise as what you'll find in Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) and doesn't return each and every page for a site Google has indexed for a few reasons. One reason, Google is preventing people without private access to the site from seeing each and every page it indexes for a site to keep that data from being scraped publicly.  In your case, that's good if your competitor is running similar searches like you're doing now in the attempt to copy your site. Instead Google gives you that information privately via GWT.

The same goes for cached pages. The overarching reason is that it's about preventing over exposure publicly both in how Google operates and how a site is constructed. Ultimately you'll have to trust GWT and your own site's server records more than what you can find searching Google as an average user.

The type of URL you posted will deliver a 404 from Google because they use a session code after the "cache:"  parameter. If you go to their site and run a search result then select the down arrow to open up the "Cached" and "Similar" menu you should be able to click through and see their cahced result. After doing so, you'll notice some code like ":l8wcNgU5elwJ:" before your URL.  With this it works, delete it and you get a 404.

I agree with Miriam and give a thumbs up to her thorough response. I would only add that not having an additional number for the separate business is pretty inexcusable.  With Skype, Anveo, or any other myriad of VOIP and cell options, getting another number is a dirt cheap cost for someone running a legitimate business. Plus the value it adds for the business should more than cover the $50 or so they'd spend yearly.  If they still want the number to ring to the same line, the could just set up call forwarding on the new number... Again, all that should cost less than $100 a year and probably be even cheaper than that.  Best of luck!