Toolbar - a Ticket to the good life?

Can you get Googlebot's attention?

[DerekH]

There's been a rumour that visiting as-yet-unindexed pages using the Google toolbar tips the wink for Googlebot to come rushing round.

Googleguy has gone into print saying that it's just so much hot air, (though he put it more eloquently than that!) but still the rumour persists.

Well, I thought it was time for a controlled experiment. Or as controlled as a maniac like me can make it...

I have a PR4 "what's new" page on one site (site A) that seems to get Googlebot every day.

I have a PR5 home page on another site (site B) that I've *never* seen get a freshdate, and as a result of this, putting a "What's New" on it three times a week is about as much use as a chocolate teapot - it's not been visited since late August, well, not to update the cache anyway.

So, with 20 new pages deep inside Site B, there was little chance of a rapid indexing simply because of osmosis from the top down.

So I deeplinked to two of the new Site B pages from the PR 4 what's new on Site A.

And I visited two more of the Site B pages using the Toolbar, two pages, one last week, one yesterday, a week apart.

And the result is...

That Googleguy was true to his word - the toolbar inspection of the unindexed pages had no effect at all.
The Deeplinks, though, are much better!

Hope this helps others get their pages indexed faster than the two of mine that are still waiting!

DerekH

[WebGuerrilla]

Derek,

I love your enthusiasim, but your experiment doesn't come close to being controlled.

I know of a few people that have spent a great deal of time testing to see if toolbar data is getting crawled. The data they have collected (and my own personal experience) shows that Google does indeed crawl urls it receives through the toolbar.

Now I'm not saying that viewing new pages with the toolbar is any kind of shortcut to getting your pages indexed. I'm just saying that the idea that Google receives millions of urls through the toolbar everyday, yet they have never thought of the idea of dumping that data (especially pages that they have no PR score for) in to the hopper, is just plain silly.

[DerekH]

Webguerilla,
You are possibly correct in your assertion that my experiment is not controlled.
Mind you I don't really see what you'd consider a controlled experiment to *be* in this circumstance, since I did what might amount to a small single blind trial - I gave two pages the Googlebot Medicine, I gave two pages a placebo (a deep link), and, to make it single blind, I didn't tell the web pages what medication they were on. Then I asked another independent assessor, Google, to have a look at the results and tell me if he thought the medication had worked.

How to make it more controlled is something, (and I speak as someone with a maths degree), I'd be interested in. Doing a lot of experiments would help, certainly, since the law of large numbers would average out the effects of chance that Googlebot was either just about to visit or had called by 10 minutes before the experiment. Two pages is a bit laughable in that respect!
So please let me have your thoughts, Webguerilla.

Actually, if you want to know what I was *really* experimenting on, it was a thought experiment. Googleguy has gone into print saying that using the toolbar in this way doesn't aid indexing, and I thought I'd tackle it from the other end. And show that I don't have any evidence that he's wrong.

I realise as well as the next man that having evidence of nothing happening is the same as having no evidence of something happening, but I thought the list might be interested in the experiment, nonetheless.

And yes, you're right about my enthusiasm - for a lot of reasons!
DerekH

[bether2]

My experimenting has also done nothing to prove googleguy wrong. The toolbar doesn't act like a "bot whistle" for me. Maybe it only works for really high PR pages?

Beth

[johnnydequino]

I kind of disagree. Everytime I submit my entire URL into the toolbar, google visits my site. For laughs, I just tried to to it right now at 5:20 eastern time. I will read my logs tomorrow and let you know.

jd

[willybfriendly]

I have twice had under development sites get spidered. I know that they did not have any inobund links - none, zilch, zero, nada - yet they appeared in the SERPS after being viewed in a toolbar equipped browser.

Anecdotal I know, but anymore if I am looking at something I don't want spidered, I don't use a toolbar equipped browser.

WBF

[dpplgngr]

it's hogwash...

"d-fresh" attraction is easily done with an rss feed / index pinger or links from any heavily googlebotted pages.

absolute fastest way is to swap ip addresses with an existing site... perhaps even a purchased domain...