Posted by Julian [designer]
Posted on 04-15-2008 under SEO

I have probably typed site:www.fryewiles 10 times today alone (Site:www.yoururl.com returns every page indexed of your site). Reason? We just launched a large amount of new content last week, and It’s my job to keep track of the search progress. Truth is that it’s become a nervous tick of sorts. Why is it taking so long to index? Well the best answer I have, is the same one I tell all our clients. It can take a long time for new content to index, that’s just how it is.

There are of course a few things you can do to decrease the wait time.

The main thing you can do is find a blog that is indexed regularly by google, and make an announcement (or link) on that site. If you have noticed, when ever we launch a new site here at Frye / Wiles we make an announcement blog post. Since it usually takes 20-45 min. for Google to crawl a new posting by our blog, this helps our new sites get noticed by Google quickly. If Google sees a new domain name as it crawls over a post, it will likely follow that link.

What about relaunches of sites? Try doing the same thing but link to an internal page. For instance a sitemap that didn’t exist before. Make sure the page you link to has lots of cross links (why I choose a sitemap) that way Googlebot will have lots of pathways to crawl.

Submit an XML sitemap to Google Webmaster Central.

Although Google will not necessarily crawl your site each time you submit a sitemap. If it’s a drastically different sitemap, then it will increase the chance of a crawl. Besides that reason, it’s important to have an XML sitemap. You can get one auto generated at xml-sitemaps.com.

So to back our case.

We did all of the above and more when we launched the new fryewiles.com site. So why did it take so long to index? Previously our site consisted of 6 pages. We increased that by over 10 times in the new site. It’s the new and improved site, or course there will be more content! Although this is not a large increase in pages compared to the Millions of pages launched on the web daily, For our site it is a large increase. Google has a history of taking time to increase the volume of an indexed sites pages. Especially when it’s in mass.

Last resort.

Calm down and watch time go by. Seriously one of the most frustrating parts of SEO is having to sit and wait on Google/Yahoo/MSN. This is why it’s helpful to have multiple projects going at any given time. Even on one site. To have a multi-pronged SEO campaign is crucial both for success and sanity. It’s a waiting game.