I tried the Google Search from IDGENWEB home page on my counties, Mike. It
works just fine!
As for SEO, have you submitted a sitemap to Google? Google responds well and
quickly to site maps. I have one personal web site that just wasn't getting
indexed even though it has about 130 web pages. I contacted Google and asked
what the problem might be. They said I needed to submit a sitemap. I did so
and, Bingo, within a week all 130 pages were indexed by Google.
My experience has also been that Google doesn't index links on pull down
menus. I got rid of my pull downs and made relative links to pages on
another personal site. Bingo again!
Check it out at
http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/
I just tried a sitemap for IDGENWEB and 68 pages were indexed on an XML
sitemap for the main site. It did not pick up the county sub-folders so any
CC interested in submitting a sitemap to Google would have to do so
seperately.
Mitch
----- Original Message -----
From: "Mike St. Clair/ST" <mike(a)saintclair.org>
To: <idgen(a)rootsweb.com>
Sent: Friday, February 26, 2010 3:32 PM
Subject: [IDGEN] FYI: Search Engine Effectiveness
A little research today on counties that are taking too long to be
indexed
led me to the conclusion that the speed of indexing is driven primarily by
what Google calls the site "Authority" which is based heavily on the links
to that site from other higher authority sites. I'm working on determining
what other sites are linking to our county sites (old and new locations)
and requesting updates where there is a means to do that. For example, I
found that CyndisList has obsolete links for several of our counties and
I've already request those changes.
As a result this process I'm going through, some of you may hear from me
privately if I find incorrect links (for example, in your neighboring
county section if you have one). I think this effort will bear fruit by
causing Google to more frequently visit our sites and update their search
index. By the way, the other search engines also use similar criteria.
If any of you have SEO expertise, I'd love to hear any other suggestions
you have to improve how the search is working for us.
Mike St. .Clair
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