Other engines, and submitting your site

Following the success at getting this blog onto Google's first page, let's see how we're doing with other search engines.

Bing: not there.
Yahoo: not there.

Dogpile: Yes! At the time of this writing, in positions 6 and 7 for this blog, and in position 11 for the website.

That last result can be put down to the fact that dogpile is a meta-search-engine. It scours Google and Yahoo! and Bing, and serves up results from all three. It finds us because Google finds us.

So, why aren't we there on Yahoo! and Bing yet? It might be more relevant to ask why we're there on Google. We haven't explicitly told any of the search engines about either the blog or the website. Bear in mind, though that blogger/blogspot is a Google property. Anything that gets posted there, they will know about instantly. How they knew about the website before I mentioned it on the blog is a bit harder to explain, but it should suffice to say that Google are very good at finding new content on the web.

Yahoo! and Bing should find us eventually. Should we hurry things along by explicitly informing them? I won't in this case, because I don't want to draw too much attention to the website before there is some worthwhile content there, but if you find that the search engines are being slow about finding your site, and you want to hurry things along, the thing to do is let them know about you by giving them your URL.

To submit a site to Google, use www.google.com/addurl.html. For Bing, the place to go to is http://www.bing.com/webmaster/SubmitSitePage.aspx. For Yahoo! use search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html

For all the others, to cut a long story short, Yahoo have a good directory of site submission links: http://dir.yahoo.com/computers_and_internet/internet/world_wide_web/searching_the_web/search_engines_and_directories/submit_a_site/

If you use these facilities, try to provide a URL from which search engines can navigate and discover all the rest of your site that you want to be made public. Usually the home page should be OK.


And why not let us know how your DIY SEO went? That's what the comments box is for. How long did it take for the search engines to discover your new site?

Search Engine Optimum discovers Google

There's plenty of other useful SEO resources on the web, apart from Search Engine Optimum, and we'll be highlighting some of them from time to time. For instance, here's Google's guide to SEO (PDF). We'll assume that they know what they're talking about, since they tend to rank pretty highly on most site ranking tables.

(To Bing, Yahoo! etcetera: Don't worry, you'll get your turn.)

Too much me, not enough PageRank

While I think this blog has got off to a reasonable start, I do notice a couple of obvious flaws. First, the blog entries are far too long; short and sweet should be the rule; and secondly, that's probably because I'm mentioning myself too much.

To alleviate these problems, I've launched yet another blog,"Martin Gradwell's Blog". You should go there if you're really here to find out all about me. So, if you're still here, I'll assume it's for the SEO. Let's plough on, and maybe mention someone else for a change.

Adrienne Smith has what looks to be a very good blog about SEO. I discovered it because one of her pages is about "10 tips for getting your name on the first page of Google", which coincidentally is the target that I have set for the name of this blog (and the target which @seogoogleexperts say they can achieve in six months or your money back. Seriously, there seems to be a lot of attention paid to that first page on Google for some reason :-) ).

Anyway, there are some good points among her ten. but she's talking about how to get your own personal site or blog into the top ten if you have a name that happens to be common. That may be relevant for my newly created personal blog, but it could only be used for a special-purpose blog like this one with some modification. I'll produce my own top ten list in a future blog entry, which may well be based on hers (with suitable acknowledgments if that is the case and sufficient differences to make it unique, of course).

One other thing that caught my eye was "Wow, Google doesn't like me any more", an article about how Adrienne's blog recently went down from PageRank 4 to PageRank 2. There doesn't seem to be any good reason for that, or at least Adrienne couldn't see one and at first glance I can't see one; but she accepts it stoically and won't let it stop her from doing what she is doing.

I think the lesson to be learned from that is that SEO isn't an exact science. Even people who have been steadily building up their ranking for years can suddenly find it reduced and be at a loss to understand why. But that's okay, because PageRank isn't everything. In fact, it isn't anything tangible at all. It's just a number. Having it reduced won't make an interesting blog any less interesting. It won't impact the experience of the average visitor to a site in any way. So, what does it actually mean?

That can be the subject of a future blog entry, since on its own it could probably fill quite a few entries. Short and sweet is the rule. Bookmark this space.