11 March 2012. This is the first article in a series of experiments that I am carrying out to find how blogs are indexed so quickly on Google. Have you ever wondered why blog posts get crawled so fast on Google? I have been fascinated by this ever since it was first demonstrated to me about 3-4 years ago. If we can understand how this works it will be a major help to increasing our rankings on Google. I intend to carry out some experiments to find what is the secret to blog posts appearing so quickly on Google. I have seen blog posts being indexed on Google in as little as 1 minute and appearing in the top 3 search results. I have done some research on this subject and there are lots of different suggestions put forward as folllows:-
1. Google likes blogs (ok that’s fine but is it the name blog that Google likes or is it the fact the content is updated regularly. If the blog page was called ‘News’ or ‘Events’ or ‘Cool Stuff’ would it be indexed as quickly? These are answers that I intend to find out in the coming months and I will post the finding here. But don’t forget that whatever the cause of the these pages being indexed quickly and ranked hight at the moment is now, it may change in the future if Google changes its crawl pattern or algorithms so this is something that will need to be continually evaluated)
2. It’s due to the Ping-o-Matic pinging service that is installed by default by WordPress (well if that’s true why has our first blog post on Barrowvale.ie not being indexed yet. I deliberately did not put a link to our blog on Barrowvale.ie to test this theory and Google has not indexed the blog so Ping-o-Matic didn’t work)
3. It may be the sitemap generator (A sitemap has been submitted but it doesn’t include the blog so Google doesn’t know about it yet. More about this in future blogs, e.g. how to set up the sitemap for the blog and what effect it has on indexing )
My next steps will be as follows:-
a) test ping-o-matic, measure and record results
b) put a link on Barrowvale.ie to the blog, measure and record results
c) Set up the sitemap, measure and record results
d) set up blogs under different names such as ‘News’ or ‘Events’ or ‘Cool Stuff’, measure and record results
I will also identify any obvious problems that will prevent a blog from performing so please stay tuned
You can read the next article in this series here
Cheers
Oliver Dempsey
Barrowvale Technology Ltd