| Why does Google hate me so much? |
| Wednesday, 02 July 2008 19:24 |
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It almost feels personal, after having a web site at this location in one form or another for nearly two years, that Google last indexed me 2 months and 2 weeks ago. Don’t they know this is the epicentre of Kelsall, or that at least two of my buddies visit the site when I force them to? Do they not know that I update the content at least weekly with new photo collections and daily with fresh commentary? I thought not. So I put on my Dick Tracey style raincoat and hat, and went out on the investigative trail to discover why some huge American organisation didn’t take me too seriously. It turns out that you need to do a few things to get noticed. Hiding text in documents and creating loads of meta tags buried within the confines of HTML (that’s the language of the web browser to you and me) is frowned upon and not the ‘correct’ way to do things. No it isnt.  So over the last few weeks I diligently resubmitted the site toGoogle. Can you believe my despair when a week later I hadn’t been re scanned? How could all those people around the world find me in their favourite search engine? Who would know that I’d seen motorbikes at Oulton Park or had published an amazingly uninteresting selection of watery butterfly images from Colwyn Bay?This was personal! I signed up for Google Analytics, pasted the code they gave me into the web pages and sat back while the hits rolled in and googlebot trawled my site. … and I waited … … and I waited some more … … then I gave up and went home. This strategy wasn’t working for me. Another trawl over Google’s webmaster tips took me to the Google webmaster tools. Here I could see exactly when I was last scanned, and (so I thought) with a bit of prodding get scanned again. Nope. During my investigations I kept coming across this thing called a sitemap. I’d written it off as a map of the site for users to access so didn’t bother with it. I was wrong. Seems it’s important as it tells Google the layout of the web site, how often each component of it changes and when. All I had to do was go and create one of these in XML format and have Google look at it, and they’ll realise how important we really are. Well they did. So far Google have seen my sitemap at least 24 times and been informed of changes to this web site on at least 10 occasions. I still haven’t been scanned. People of the world still don’t know that I went for a walk in Delamere Forest and took some pictures, or that I hid on a rooftop and took photographs of the Grand National crowds leaving Aintree. This was a disaster of gargantuan proportions! Then my cunning plan was hatched… So I signed up for context sensitive (that’s site relevant to you and me) advertising from Google. Heh, they’ll have to rescan me now to get the right context. Google turned down my application because they didn’t like my address. Bah, foiled again. A quick resubmit on the forms yielded a success email from my favourite web space advertisers a few hours later and I was in business. I cunningly placed some of Google’s advertising code at the bottom of two pages (of which this is one) and waited at the front door for googlebot to arrive. Then I waited some more, … and finally went to bed. Well it’s now the following morning and I haven’t been scanned, indexed or … whatever. So much for high speed computing! Gone out to take some pictures… Dave Add your comment |