Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I decided to make some updates to about 20% of the pages and submitted my first sitemap via Google webmaster tool account.
I have since waited several days but the number of indexed pages stay about the same (thank god it did not go further down....) but how long should i expect to wait until i see something happen? one week? one month or longer? My domain name is about 8 months old and files were uploaded for the first time about two months ago.
Each page has a unique title but the entire site shares one description meta tag. My site traffics has been really low and I found that my Google visitors found the site mostly because of the unique page titles, and they are not ideal users for my case at this point. Can adding unique meta tags, which I did over the weekend, help reasonably increase traffics? I did some research trying to find the answer but people are saying different things...very confusing, haha.
The update I did before submitting the site map, adding unique description meta tags, are not yet being shown in any of the currently indexed pages so I cant tell at this point.
My logs never show Google bot's visit in the past months (even during the time when I found my pages being indexed, which should mean Google bot did visit my site)What is the Google bot's name? just Googlebot? I feel that I may need to know that to see how often Google bot visits...also, will Google add indexed pages over a time period because the size of the site? or this is it for me, 3% of the entire site?
How can I increase traffics?
I sort of want to get backlinks in natural ways, which I mean just let people find my site themselves and decide if they want to link to me while I concentrate of working on the site itself. Not entirely sure if I am being too confident tho...
In this case, what can I do to help getting more Google traffics? I understand that more content will definitely help. My problem is that I will need other people to collaborate in order to add useful content to the site. To convince others to collaborate, I will have to show them that it will worth it because the site is popular (has good traffics)...
As for now, I can add some very general guidelines, descriptions to each page but that will mean the site will end up having a lot of repeated content, which I heard Google doesnt like...but is this still better than doing nothing?
Thank you very much for your help.
If the site has 10 million pages and you got 300K to 500K pages indexed you're doing great.
If huge is 100 pages...not so good.
Getting indexed is a different matter than getting chosen from the index. Google will index practically anything, but that doesn't mean your site will show up when your target audience search for stuff.
If you've got lots of the sort of content that your audience will like, and link to, then you need to put your site in front of those people, via whatever mechanism seems best to you. If your potential audience doesn't know about your site, then it's not going to work in Google or elsewhere.
not 10 millions, far from that but for my case 3% means thousands
...seems like the number of pages is not an issue here...but, but, but isnt it reasonable to think that googlebot try not to fetch all pages all at once because that will take a lot of bandwidth from our servers, especially for sites in big sizes? i dont know and that's one of the things i wanted to find out..
ReceptionalAndy,
thanks for the reply. this may not have much to do with the original posting, but how much content is good content? lets say i have a recipe website, each page contains one recipe, and the site is created for busy people, i would think that the writing should get to the point and stop where it should. some pages can be just a few lines but that doesnt always mean the pages have no good content. Instead, i consider pages like that well designed and useful. what matter is: does googlebot think that way too? how will those short content effect how google value a site like that? i have seen sites with paragraphs and paragraphs of words that tells the users simple things which can be clearly said in as short as 2,3 lines ("i know nothing about this topic. I write all these paragraphs to fool you guys. Thanks for reading")...i consider those kind of sites MFA even they "have content".Do those sites get more attentions from google? I hope that a smart company like Google at least is aware of that. So back to the question, how long does google take to index a site? any ideas?..
isnt it reasonable to think that googlebot try not to fetch all pages all at once because that will take a lot of bandwidth from our servers, especially for sites in big sizes? i dont know and that's one of the things i wanted to find out..
Right - normally googlebot will stretch out the indexing, and for relatively new sites, it often gets stretched over many weeks. Googlebot comes to every domain with a "crawl budget" to spend. It's up to your site to help Google spend that budget wisely. Duplicate urls of any kind waste the budget. Extraneous links waste the budget. Clear navigation helps the budget stretch further. More extenrasl links can raise the level of the budget.
how long does google take to index a site?
Except for rather small sites, a "complete" indexing is pretty rare. That's why you want to be sute that googlebot can easily find your best pages. Even some major corporate sites I've worked with are lucky to break the 90% indexed level.
It was very helpful to know that googlebot does have a "budget." I have checked the site many times and found that the sitemap generator recommended by google actually helped me find the few broken links and i already have them all fixed, so that looks like i am in ok shape. I dont have any duplicated pages...perhaps some...but less than 1% of the entire site so I hope that is not too bad..
Thanks for letting me know that 90% indexed level goal is ambitious. In fact, my goal is to have all the second level and third level pages indexed asap (that's about 30% of the site), should I remove the URLs from the third level pages for now to increase the chance for that 30% to be indexed first? i feel that this is kind of risky to do if i dont really know what i am doing, please advise. Thanks again.
Two months is still a very young website. Give it time to grow naturally, according to your original plan, and best of luck to you. A listing in a few top quality directories can also help, as well as some activity on social medai sites. But most of all, keep building quality and you often can win out over the long run with only minimal intentional promotion.
[edited by: tedster at 4:17 am (utc) on July 9, 2008]
Each page has a unique title but the entire site shares one description meta tag.
Your pages will generally do much better if they have indvidual description tags.
Also do check your internal navigation - xenu is your friend.
