Google Webmaster Tools
Just a week ago, I wrote an article about Googlebots and how my site hadn’t been indexed by Google recently. Since then, I’ve continued to add content and research my Google problem. I stumbled upon something that cleared up a lot for me.
Early on I found Google Analytics, which is a cool free tool by Google that maintains the statistics for your website traffic (The details of that are for a future post). Having a Google Analytics account adds a few more options to your Google account, including Google Webmaster Tools. If you have a Google account, you must login and click on “My Account”. You’ll see a lot of options, like Google Analytics and Google AdSense. But late last night, for some strange reason, I scrolled down further to see what else was in my account. Since Google lists things alphabetically, I never saw the link to “Webmaster Tools”. I’m sure happy I found it though.
The first time you enter Google Webmaster Tools you can add your URL. Once you do that, Google gives you two ways to verify that you are the owner of the site. First, you can add an HTML page with a long random name that Google generates. This option was giving me problems. I kept getting errors, so I went to option two - add a META tag to the index page. This META tag had another randomized code that Google generated. Once I added the META tag to the header, Google verified that I was the webmaster to my site and they directed me to the answer I’ve been looking for… On the Overview page I quote, “Home page crawl: Googlebot last successfully accessed your home page on Jul 24, 2008.” So there it is, the exact same day that I wrote an article saying that my site hasn’t been indexed in a while, Google indexes it later that day. Talk about service! Just kidding.
Now it has been six days since those Google spiders have crawled my site. Hopefully, they’ll visit again soon because I’ve been updating daily. So if you want to know when Google last indexed your page, sign-up for Google Analytics and click on Google Webmaster Tools. The answer is just a few clicks away.
I’ll write more about Google Analytics all the features of Webmaster Tools as I discover them. Best of luck.
Just a Drop in the Bucket - Weekly Report #2
We made some progress this week. I’ve been doing a lot of content building and applying for different advertising networks. Hopefully in the coming months, I’ll have a few streams of income coming in. Long way to go… Here are the summaries:
Website #1
- Total Visitors: 367
- Visitors Per Day: 52
- AdRoll:$0.53
- Revver:$0.00
- Link Share: $0.00
- Commission Junction: $0.00
- Google Adsense:$0.07
- Amazon Affiliate: $0.00
- Weekly Revenue: $0.60 (Record High)
I’ve spent a lot of time adding content. Unfortunately, Google hasn’t updated the index of the site yet, so my work isn’t reflected in my visitor average yet. I did get to post a few responses on a couple message boards that boosted traffic for the day (70 visits). I also started to add more ads. Spent time researching the proper ad sizes and placement… Still not my forte, but will keep trying.
Website #2
- Total Visitors: 78
- Visitors Per Day: 11
- No Ads
Just adding content.
Website #3
- Total Visitors: 22
- Visitors Per Day: 3
- No Ads
Just adding content.
Website #4
Not yet live, still on paper.
Adding new content, but where are them Googlebots?
I’ve been adding new content daily to one of my websites, but my traffic hasn’t changed much… It made me curious, does Google even know that these pages exist? If them Googlebots haven’t visited recently, my pages won’t appear in their index and in no search results. Time to check. Here’s how:
- Go to Google.com
- In the search box type: site:www.mysite.com
- You’ll see all the page results for your website
Well, after a quick check I can see that a number of my pages haven’t been indexed. I’m guessing that it has been over a week since it was last visited by my favorite bots. There is one thing that I noticed though. All of the blog posts I have entered seems to show up relatively quick, but the static pages can be delayed by weeks. I’m not sure how I’m going to turn that to my advantage, but it is an interesting observation.
So, in my weekly updates I was planning to add a visitor count for the week, but it looks like the efforts I make during a week might not reflect in the traffic count for a while. Well, hopefully Google will visit again soon. Maybe I can entice them with a tasty snack. Anyone know what these things like? Maybe when they see how much has changed since their last visit, they’ll decide to come back more often. Back to adding more content…