Indexing and Ranking
It is not easy to get a high Google ranking.
A few weeks back I revived my auction website, www.fleahaus.com. I say revived because I originally developed the site a few years back. It was born, it floundered, it died a slow and agonizing death.
So I got a case of the what-if-I-had-done-it-a-little-differentlies and decided to administer CPR. For example, I initially designed the site show items by region, a feat accomplished by using subdomains. Criagslist uses this very concept currently---based on the geographical data you submit, you see a city based portal. For example---when I visit craigslist, I am directed to http://tulsa.craigslist.com because I live in the Tulsa area. My original site used the same pattern.
This time around I threw out the city based portal idea and introduced a local search button. This ultimately accomplishes the same goal---giving users a way to find items that are geographically near to them---something very important to those who want to sell items too large or heavy to ship by mail. This gave me a change to try out Google's GeoLocate APIs.
After the face-lift and new features were done, it took three weeks before Google indexed my site. This is apparently not too bad.
The delay in indexing during that three weeks was a major concern for me--- especially because I had so much trouble getting the original site indexed. I partially attribute the failure of the original site (www.communitybuy.com for the record) to my inability to get Google to index the darn thing.
I'm still not quite sure why communitybuy.com failed to make it into the index. Perhaps because I didn't put effort into back-linking at that time? Formatting issues? Only the crawler knows for sure.
Google's webmaster tools have been beneficial this go-round. I have been able to check crawl rates, get indexing status, and more.
So one milestone met: www.fleahaus.com is indexed. Next, find a way to move up the rankings.
A few weeks back I revived my auction website, www.fleahaus.com. I say revived because I originally developed the site a few years back. It was born, it floundered, it died a slow and agonizing death.
So I got a case of the what-if-I-had-done-it-a-little-differentlies and decided to administer CPR. For example, I initially designed the site show items by region, a feat accomplished by using subdomains. Criagslist uses this very concept currently---based on the geographical data you submit, you see a city based portal. For example---when I visit craigslist, I am directed to http://tulsa.craigslist.com because I live in the Tulsa area. My original site used the same pattern.
This time around I threw out the city based portal idea and introduced a local search button. This ultimately accomplishes the same goal---giving users a way to find items that are geographically near to them---something very important to those who want to sell items too large or heavy to ship by mail. This gave me a change to try out Google's GeoLocate APIs.
After the face-lift and new features were done, it took three weeks before Google indexed my site. This is apparently not too bad.
The delay in indexing during that three weeks was a major concern for me--- especially because I had so much trouble getting the original site indexed. I partially attribute the failure of the original site (www.communitybuy.com for the record) to my inability to get Google to index the darn thing.
I'm still not quite sure why communitybuy.com failed to make it into the index. Perhaps because I didn't put effort into back-linking at that time? Formatting issues? Only the crawler knows for sure.
Google's webmaster tools have been beneficial this go-round. I have been able to check crawl rates, get indexing status, and more.
So one milestone met: www.fleahaus.com is indexed. Next, find a way to move up the rankings.
Comments
Oh and what's the deal with the Pink Floyd lyrics? That's just my fun alternative to a page that says, "This site is no longer active."