developing and hosting web sites and applications for the Third Sector and SMEs since 2003
Posted Mar 29th 2008, 10:43 by PaulGardner
The main challenge our site faced with regards to search engines is that its predecessor - the single web page - had been in place with very few updates since early 2005. Whilst it had a page rank of 4/10 - presumably from the volume of backlinks - it could not have been a high priority for bots to visit for updated content.
Surprisingly Yahoo Slurp! (Yahoo's search bot) weighed in with multiple visits every day since the site launched registering multiple hits each time. Googlebot (Google's search bot) waited until the 24th to pay us a visit and only registered a couple of hits, but has been back every day since with more hits each time. And finally there's MSNBot (MSN Live's search bot) which has been a few times but in total has registered only 10 hits this month.
In looking at the above I would have expected Yahoo! to have indexed more pages than Google and MSN Live and up until a couple of days ago this was true with Yahoo! showing 1 page of our new site - Shared Hosting.
However, a quick check around the search engines today - around a week after the bots all had visited - shows that Google has indexed 10 of the new pages whilst Yahoo! is still showing old data for our home page and only 4 of the new pages. MSN Live has updated its cache of the home page, but has failed to index any further pages as of yet.
We have validated our website with each of the three search engines and on Yahoo! have submitted the RSS Feeds for our News and FrogBlog pages so will keep an eye on progress to update this post with.
3 Comments
Apr 1st 2008, 09:16 by PaulGardner
Update:
Google still lists the same 10 pages that were added to the index on 29th March, but Yahoo! went up to 8 yesterday and lists 16 pages today - including two RSS feeds that I submitted through Yahoo!'s site manager.
MSN Live still only lists the home page of the new site.
Apr 2nd 2008, 18:53 by PaulGardner
Update2:
Google is now showing 61 pages in its index, whilst Yahoo! is steadily increasing day on day showing 27. MSN Live is still bringing up the rear, still not having indexed anything other than the home page.
It's quickly become apparent that the Directory module needs some work to show meaningful page titles when browsing categories and directory entries. Will be interesting to see how quickly the newly indexed Directory pages will update with new page titles applied.
Apr 5th 2008, 10:40 by PaulGardner
Update3:
- Google 63 pages
- Yahoo! 46 pages
- MSN Live 1 page
Still to update the Directory module, will report on that soon.
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