Google and the other main Search Engines allow webmasters to create a Sitemap file that helps them to discover and crawl your site’s pages and content.

Many webmasters and site owners wonder how long it takes after creating their Sitemap for Google to index their sites? Well in my experience Google will not index a website unless they find at least one link to that website from another website.

This means that it is essential that your site has at least one in-bound link that Google can follow to your site.

So after you get your Sitemap up and running make sure that your site has some in-bound links from other websites - if you can get links from high-traffic, trusted websites I’m willing to bet that your site will be indexed in quick time.

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If a page is missing, it needs to return the code 404 (”not found”). With that code, the server can return any kind of content that the browser will display. The user will still be able to see that, but a crawler will stop at code 404 and not index the rest. There are some really good ideas about how to make a user-friendly 404 page on the web, it makes sense to read up on that.

The 301 redirect serves a different purpose: it moves the visitor and the search engine to a related page. The technical background to this is that it generally takes the search engines less time to process a 301 than to recognize a 404.
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Google hates stolen content just as much as you do, luckily there is an official channel to get that content removed, which outlined here.

Often if you file notice with the host of the site that has your stolen content on it, they will remove the site during their investigation. Since the site will then show 404’s for the pages while the site is down, you can then have it removed from Google’s search results.

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Many domain registrars have a simple way of allowing you to use your domain name to point to your content on some other web-server / domain. This is often done to save costs - you can usually activate this service free of charge and use it to point to content on a free web-hoster. There are several ways of doing this and the registrars sometimes call it by different names.

The problem is always the same: Read the rest of this entry »

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We’ve added Vannessa Fox’s personal blog to our blogroll. It’s a fresh new blog but already she is giving great SEO advice with this Quickie SEO primer. She joins Matt Cutts on the Googler blogroll.

Adam, we haven’t forgot you but respected your blog as it’s trully personal as you rarely speak about webmastering on it.

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Google has started to list URLs that were not found while crawling the site. You will find further URLs that were not found within your webserver log-files or statistics. If a URL is used often, it makes sense to track down the source and to correct it (or have it corrected). A URL that is not found in your site will discourage visitors from looking at more of your site.

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When moving to a new domain name (with the same site) you will need to use a [301 redirect]. The 301 redirect tells the search engines that the old address is no longer valid and to pass all value to the new address. There are some details that you should look into and correct if they are incorrect.

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