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Google's Indexing Timeline
May 18, 2006
Matt Cutts on Google's indexing timeline: it's a long read, especially if you go through all the comments, but you definitely should check it out if you're having trouble either getting a site indexed, or have too many pages coming up in supplemental results.
Here are some interesting nuggets from the post and Matt's various replies in the comments. First, from the post itself:
Some folks that were doing a lot of reciprocal links might see less crawling. If your site has very few links where you’d be on the fringe of the crawl, then it’s relatively normal that changes in the crawl may change how much of your site we crawl. And if you’ve got an affiliate site, it makes sense to think about the amount of value-add that your site provides; you want to provide a reason why users would prefer your site.
So if you've been doing excessive reciprocal linking, Googlebot will crawl your site less. And if you have too few inbound links, it will mess with the crawl too. Sounds like you need to seek a happy medium. And related reciprocal links are definitely the way to go. An example that Matt points to is a real estate site:
Linking to a free ringtones site, an SEO contest, and an Omega 3 fish oil site? I think I’ve found your problem. I’d think about the quality of your links if you’d prefer to have more pages crawled.
And for affiliate sites, adding value, which likely means more original content, will help you out. From earlier in the post, for example:
Somebody wrote about a “favorites” site that sells T-shirts. The site had about 100 pages, and now Google is showing about five pages. Looking at the site, the first problem that I see is that only 1-2 domains have any links at all to you. The person said that every page has original content, but every link that I clicked was an affiliate link that went to the site that actually sold the T-shirts. And the snippet of text that I happened to grab was also taken from the site that actually sold the T-shirts. The site has a blog, which I’d normally recommend as a good way to get links, but every link on the blog is just an affiliate link. The first several posts didn’t even have any text, and when I found an entry that did, it was copied from somewhere else. So I don’t think that the drop in indexed pages for this domain necessarily points to an issue on Google’s side. The question I’d be asking is why anyone would choose your “favourites” site instead of going directly to the site that sells T-shirts?
Moving on to the comments:
How to go about getting quality inbound links?
Things like blogs are a great way to attract links because you’re offering a look behind the curtain of whatever your subject is, for example.
And a sort of guideline to getting indexed/crawled:
There’s SEO and there’s QUALITY and there’s also finding the hook or angle that captivates a visitor and gets word-of-mouth or return visits. First I’d work on QUALITY. Then there’s factual SEO. Things like: are all of my pages reachable with a text browser from a root page without going through exotic stuff. Or having a site map on your site. After you’re site is crawlable, then I’d work on the HOOK that makes your site interesting/useful.
It's a very interesting read, and definitely so if you've got a few sites that you're having difficulty getting crawled or indexed, or have lots of pages in supplemental results.
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Posted by BJ at 01:38 PM in SEO | Permalink
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