Great Day Interactive Findability Blog

Posts Tagged ‘google’

Knowing how the engines see your site is the first step to understanding what you need to do to fix it’s findability.

Here are some links to some of the tools I use when trying to determine how well a site’s content is indexed by a search engine.

1. Start with Google. Run an ‘advanced’ query against your domain, omitting the www. It might look like this:
site:yourdomain.com

The results of this search is essentially the list of all the pages Google has indexed from your site.

2. http://www.feedthebot.com/tools/spider/ is a tool that gives you a bares-bones look at how the engines see your homepage. This tool is incredibly helpful for diagnosing issues w/ Flash indexing.

3. This last one is a bit arcane, but can give you a good idea as to how your content is seen by the engines. The URL is http://www.yellowpipe.com/yis/tools/lynx/lynx_viewer.php , and it simulates the text-only browser Lynx.

Knowing how your site looks to the engines is the first step toward identify how to improve it.

Please give me a call if you’d like to learn more about how I can help you make your site more findable.

Cheers!

So I started this new company back in May. I built out my website and used the Google Webmaster tools to submit my sitemap. If you’re not familiar with this, it’s the simplest method for getting all your site’s pages indexed in the Google. It took about 3 days for my entire site to be indexed.

So what’s the problem with Bing? It too has webmaster tools, and a submit sitemap function. Here I am 3 WEEKS after submitting my sitemap and Bing has yet to index all my pages.

Maybe I’m spoiled. But if Google is setting the bar for service when it comes to webmaster tools, Bing has long, long way to go.

The effective submission of sitemaps is critical to achieving the highest possible degree of findability for your site and content.