An Experiment of a Webmaster

Google has finally fully indexed this site. You can look back to the first post to find out when it was and do the math to figure out how long it took. An odd thing about the google index times is that the google index regularly had 2 pages of mine included at anytime. Whenever I’d search on my site name, the google index would return the home page and the most recent post. After I made another post, the previous one would not be returned once the google index was updated. Exactly whats going on with that is something I’d like to know. Maybe google didn’t feel I was important enough to list all of the pages until I hit a certain threshold.

Ok, while this isn’t a business, I think its an ok predictor of how popular a web site can be when it has ok content and very little promotion. The site has gotten a little bit of traffic recently from google and other search engines. It seems my story on the comcast blacklist was a little popular. As a reminder if you like something I write, feel free to blog about it and link back Continue reading ‘Milestones so far’

My sitemaps admin screen has shown me the first helpful thing yeserday. The Dark Grimoire started using sitemaps on the forums as of the 2nd to try and get all of its posts indexed where they may have been more difficult to find before. I also modified the posting functions of phpBB2 to notify google of sitemap changes everytime someone posts a reply. I don’t utilize priorities yet mainly because the plug n play mod I started with doesn’t and I don’t want to have to figure out a way to quantify important of each thread yet. Continue reading ‘Google sitemaps comes through’

So far Google Sitemaps is really interesting me. For those who don’t know, Google Sitemaps is googles attempt to let a webmaster describe the characteristics of their site, how often the pages change, and most importantly what pages exist at all. Googles crawler is extremely effective at browsing your whole site and indexing it, but like any automated system it has some issues. It has to recognise and avoid loops so it doesn’t keep requesting the file with just different things on the end like ?sid=. phpBB, the forum software, adds the ?sid= to your address if the user doesn’t have cookies enabled so they can track this person login. Google doesn’t use cookies so they’ll be given session IDs in their url unless you fix it. When this happens google thinks they are all different pages and has to sort it out, which is hazardous to your site since it may just give up and leave.
Continue reading ‘Google Sitemaps’