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Will site page published 2003-03-20 be indexed by 2003-05-07?

How long does it take?

         

g1smd

2:31 am on Mar 21, 2003 (gmt 0)

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I have a friend who has published a "bare bones" web page about an event that occurs on 2003-05-07. On that date, the page will have a live web cam, picture highlights, and all sorts of other information. At the moment, the page just contains text about what is going to happen. On the day, many people will be looking for information about this event, so it would be nice if it were indexed in Google. The question is, will this page, published today, be indexed in time, by 2003-05-07, or is it too late? How long does it take to get indexed? Many of the other pages of this site are already indexed for several years, so Google only has to notice the extra page and scan it.

hitchhiker

4:53 am on Mar 30, 2003 (gmt 0)

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I've been adding domain after domain in the last couple of months. Few things Ive noticed:

I can be in the listing within 2-5 days (PR5 linked), I'll disappear for a day regularly and pop back the next..

My keywords tend to be dramatically volatile, ie 'this that' will show me first page, 'this that more' I wont exist (I assume this is due to my complete lack of PR)

Sites, (all similar structure, no similar content) tend to get 12 out of 60+ pages initially, and after each dance 20/30+ out of 60 (some show PR0 for the first month)

g1smd

5:31 pm on Mar 30, 2003 (gmt 0)

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Google's handling of dates has meant that I have had to spend a lot of time fiddling about. Google does not handle a date as a date.

I have found that I have had to try to think of the many different formats that might be used for an enquiry and then try to include all of them in the page.

Initially, if anyone typed 2003 05 07 in any order as a part of their query, the page I have been working on would be found somewhere in the listings, but the position varied wildly depending on which order those numbers were typed in. However, the page was not listed at all if either May was used instead of 05 for the month, nor was it listed if either 7 or 7th was used instead of 07 for the day number.

I have therefore had to try to work all of these elements into the page: 2003 05 May 07 7 7th, but even so, I have noticed that depending on the elements used in the query, and the order used, that the page may still go up or down the listings by several dozen, and in one case several hundred, places.

I expect that this behaviour isn't intuitive to many users, nor to many web designers; in that looking for 7 May 03 might bring no useful information, whilst 2003 05 07 might have brought hundreds of hits.

.

Is this yet another reason to ask for standardisation of date formats, as in an old thread [webmasterworld.com] or older thread [webmasterworld.com] from last year, and an ancient thread [webmasterworld.com] from 2001?

Of course, all of this will eventually happen anyway, but only when data is encapsulated in XML tags that state what the data actually is, and the data uses only a limited subset of allowed formats based on ISO 8601 [RFC 3339].

[Hmm, 400 posts!]

g1smd

9:41 pm on Mar 31, 2003 (gmt 0)

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This freshbot sure does keep you busy!

Listed in the index on 2003-03-29 and 2003-03-30 and then tonight no longer to be found anywhere at all.

I really don't want to have to make changes to the pages every day just to stay listed. Oh for an update, and soon!

cdog90260

10:59 pm on Mar 31, 2003 (gmt 0)

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I'm obviously new to this forum and thought this topic was appropriate, so I'll post here.

My site has 0 pr in google. I have been working on high quality link partners and have good amount of link partners.

Some people will not link to me, and say that I might be banned from google, so they dont want to associate with me. Is there a way to find out if this is true?

I have around 30 high pr link partners and wondering how can I improve my own pr.

I've been working on this for about a month now, and I dont see any results that link to me, but they do.

I appreciate if you can help me out.

4serendipity

11:26 pm on Mar 31, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member




I have found that I have had to try to think of the many different formats that might be used for an enquiry and then try to include all of them in the page.

While the problems associated with differing date formats might be true, I'm thinking that you might be aiming at the wrong key phrases.

I rarely include precise dates in any query. Perhaps a month and/or a year, but never a complete date. I would suggest targeting "May" and some subject terms.

As form keeping freshbot coming: It sounds like you're doing fairly well right now, but if I were you, I'd start adding a new page now and again to make sure that freshbot remains well fed.

metablue

11:41 pm on Mar 31, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



cdog - It takes a month or two for changes to make their way into Google, so the PR you see now reflects the state of your site at the end of January. If you've been working on the links for a month, most of them wouldn't have been in place during the last deep crawl, and definitely not in January. So don't worry yet.

If you explain to potential link partners that your site is new, they're usually a lot more open to linking with you despite the PR0.

g1smd

12:11 am on Apr 1, 2003 (gmt 0)

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>> I rarely include precise dates in any query <<

In this case the event takes place for several hours on a specific date. There have been other events on random dates for a very long time. Some people, those that know that the events are usually separated by several years, will probably only enter the year in their enquiry. Those who do not know this fact may very well enter more detail for the date; and then fail to find the site if their format is different to any that have been used on the site. That's why I tried to cover all angles.

The page does very well for about 5 or 6 other keywords, nearly always in the top 40, and mostly in the top 20 for most two word searches (often top 5). For most three word searches it is number one; but when adding the date to the query it is sink or swim time depending on the format used.

g1smd

10:58 pm on Apr 1, 2003 (gmt 0)

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Hmm, the Freshbot isn't as clever as some may have guessed. It only seems to compare against the very last cached version.

After the site dropped out of the listings a couple of days ago, I reverted the page content back to the very first version of the site (out of the three that have been published in the last week or so) and this has resulted in the site now being shown back in the listings with a 31 Mar 2003 tag; however the site title shown by Google is still from version 3 of the site, which is the one in the Google cache!

g1smd

10:31 pm on Apr 2, 2003 (gmt 0)

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I changed the file back to the latest version, late last night, with a small update on top of that, and today the page is nowhere to be seen in the listings. Heh, good fun this.

g1smd

10:27 pm on Apr 3, 2003 (gmt 0)

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Last night, I reverted the page content back to the very first version of the site (out of the three that have been published in the last week or so) and this has resulted in the site now being shown back in the listings with a 02 Apr 2003 tag; however the site title shown by Google is still from version 3 of the site, which is also the one in the Google cache!

In for a day. Out for a day. Ad infinitum. How long to the next update?

g1smd

11:56 pm on Apr 4, 2003 (gmt 0)

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Last night, the file was changed back to the very latest version. Today the site was no longer to be found anywhere in the listings, yet again. Tonight, there was a small update to the page. We will now see what tomorrow brings.

g1smd

10:12 pm on Apr 5, 2003 (gmt 0)

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Obviously not enough changes, as the site is still no longer to be found anywhere in the listings.

Receptional Andy

10:33 pm on Apr 5, 2003 (gmt 0)



Hi g1smd,
Noticed this post for while but never actually clicked on it ;)

>>In for a day. Out for a day. Ad infinitum. How long to the next update?

Are your pages static html or dynamic? If you have dynamic pages or can use includes you could write a few decent sized paragraphs about your event (that have changed content) in a text file and then use a randomising script to display a random one every page view. You could this with a couple of lines of PHP. This could get the freshbot to keep indexing your page, and would definitely save you having to write something every day. Just a thought...

>>how long til the next update?

A major update will be fairly soon, I think.

g1smd

10:48 pm on Apr 5, 2003 (gmt 0)

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It is a static page of information. The page will contain a webcam for a few hours on 2003-05-07, and I expect a lot of people to be looking for information at that time, but not much before that. The ISP does not support PHP etc.

Receptional Andy

11:05 pm on Apr 5, 2003 (gmt 0)



There are no guarantees but if the freshbot is visiting your pages frequently then unless Google doesn't a deep crawl update at all before 2003-05-07 (and you keywords aren't massively competitive?) you should get the traffic you are after.

g1smd

11:08 pm on Apr 6, 2003 (gmt 0)

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Changed the site back to the older version yesterday, and still not listed today. Now changed it back to a heavily updated version of "version 3".

I just noticed that the .com version of the site is what was originally listed in Google; but that several good links from other sites actually point to the .net version of the URL which Google has never listed; however Google is listing some of those pages that contain the "incorrect" link - the ISP automatically provides several formats that can be used: home.isp.com/user/ and home.isp.net/user/ as well as www.user.isp.com/ and a few others. I am wondering if that is going to cause a big problem.

g1smd

11:23 pm on Apr 7, 2003 (gmt 0)

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Still down and out, gone and disappeared. Trying again to attract the Freshbot to come back and list the site, with a rewrite of the page, and which was uploaded late this evening.

A three keyword search, one that has previously returned between three and five results each time when tried in the last week or two, today returns five results (and does not include the site this thread is about), of which three have a 05 Apr 2003 fresh tag on them. One of the sites also includes a link to the page in question.

g1smd

10:20 pm on Apr 8, 2003 (gmt 0)

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Hmm, that didn't help. Still no listing. The 05 Apr 2003 tags have disappeared from the other sites though.
Run out of ideas now.

g1smd

7:47 pm on Apr 9, 2003 (gmt 0)

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Hmm. Still no listing, but suddenly there are more sites listed in the results from both www2.google.com and www3.google.com (which seem to be identical) than there are in the results listed shown in www.google.com; and that is a change from only an hour or two ago when all three were showing equal listings and have been for several weeks.

I assume that the site isn't now going to make it into the index this time around; the update being sometime about now or in the next few days.

g1smd

9:40 pm on Apr 9, 2003 (gmt 0)

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Ah, www1 and www2/www3 results are now sometimes the same, and two listed sites (hmm, now three sites) have since grown a 08 Apr 2003 fresh tag sometime in the last 10 minutes or so. Occasionally the various sites are not giving identical numbers of results each time, and www isn't showing the fresh dates most of the time.

Still no listing for the site, that was doing so well last week. I assume it has now missed the update. Is there any way to tell beforehand?

g1smd

10:12 pm on Apr 10, 2003 (gmt 0)

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Still no listing, fresh or otherwise. The 08 Apr 2003 fresh tags on the previous sites disappeared just a few hours ago. Found a couple more sites to link to the site.

g1smd

11:06 pm on Apr 10, 2003 (gmt 0)

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An hour later: Fresh tags are back on those sites, but 09 Apr 2003 instead.

g1smd

9:01 pm on Apr 12, 2003 (gmt 0)

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Could not find the site in the listings at all on the evening of April 11th, during the update.

On the morning of April 12th, there is a listing for a very limited number of keywords. It isn't for the main site, but instead it is for just a single introduction page that I added to another high PR site. The introduction just has one paragraph of text, and a link through to the site itself. Google has listed this page in preference to the site, and it doesn't rank very well. It doesn't have a fresh tag, so I assume that it is the updated entry in place for the next month.

This evening, the situation is much the same, except that the introduction page is now at about position 3 to 7 for several good keyword combinations. However, it doesn't list at all for several other desirable combinations, ones that the main site itself is highly optimised for, and which did very well in the few days that the site itself was listed as fresh just over a week or so ago. Hmmmmm.

g1smd

8:43 pm on Apr 16, 2003 (gmt 0)

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The site has been out of the listings for well over a week now, since a few days before the update infact. The one paragraph introduction page on another site, has been showing instead (but badly ranked as it isn't optimised, and was only ever meant to be a high PR "vote" for the site itself). Found another few sites that have added links to the site, all by themselves, so other people seem to like it.

Today the site is suddenly back in the listings with 15 Apr 2003 tags, even though nothing has been changed on the site for over a week. In fact for one three-keyword search there are only 10 results returned, and seven of these are marked as fresh.

In one single-keyword search the site is number one in 4.8 million listings. You cannot be serious? These results must be biased, as I was doing searches involving that specific keyword, but combined with others, just before that. I wonder if I would get the same result if I did that search somewhen else from a different machine?

g1smd

7:47 am on Apr 20, 2003 (gmt 0)

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It was frash tag listed for a day, then listed without fresh tags for a few hours before dropping out of the listings again. I altered a few links, over the last few days, and it is now back in, with a 18 Apr 2003 fresh tag.

g1smd

10:30 pm on Apr 20, 2003 (gmt 0)

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Still listed, but for the last 12 hours it has not had fresh tags on it.

g1smd

5:52 am on Apr 22, 2003 (gmt 0)

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Has stayed in the listings for several days now, but still shown without a fresh tag. Traffic has gone from ~5 visitors a day then suddenly jumped to ~40 then ~70 in the last two days. It is climbing steadily and expected to continue this trend (this is a topic that people aren't aware of now, but will be newsworthy in a few weeks time, hence getting the site prepared early). On the day of the event, expecting thousands of visitors. Hope the listing has now "stuck", even though this is after the update.

g1smd

12:32 am on Apr 24, 2003 (gmt 0)

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Hmmm, still solidly listed in the top positions, every day since the one day that the site showed 18 Apr 2003 fresh tags. The listings now are always without a fresh tag.

Last evening, while using Google, I realised that several sites in the listings, ones that I had already visited, no longer showed their link in the visited colour, on some searches. I then noticed that Google had appended some long, almost random, character information to the end of the site URL, as shown in the browser status bar on mouseover. Looks like they were tracking something. Would that be the listed site or the Google user?

g1smd

7:40 pm on Apr 24, 2003 (gmt 0)

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Gakk. I spoke too soon. The listings are gone, replaced instead with two pages that point to the site (and rank lower) rather than anything on the site itself. These two pages are fresh tagged with the 24 Apr 2003 date. Still got 70 hits so far today, and at the time, with nearly 5 hours left of the day to go, so could still yet be the best day for hits.

g1smd

1:09 am on Apr 26, 2003 (gmt 0)

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Those two link pages were fresh tagged until only an hour or so ago. They are no longer tagged, but are still listed. I expect them to drop out of the listings in the next 12 hours or so.

I have managed to get one of those pages marked as robots: noindex,follow and hope that on the next pass, Google decides to re-add the site itself, rather than this page that just links to it.

Made a few content changes yesterday, added a news section, so I hope freshbot likes what it sees.

Disappointed to read in other threads that the next update is likely to be between May 10 and 16th. Darn, the site only needs to be in Google on May 6th and May 7th; the rest of eternity doesn't matter at all.

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