11/02/2008
I have been tracking Google’s indexing for a few sites I work on (this is how I track Google’s indexing). The index for one site has dropped hard while the other sites saw no large movements. While this is a weak conclusion, I assumed a change on the site had caused the shift, not a change on Google’s side.
As I was researching possible causes for the shift downward, I remembered that our server (we have complete control of our server, it is not hosted by an external company) had issues around the same time. The site traffic and search engine crawling was working our servers hard. We started to experience server timeouts and slow server response times. Could this be the cause?
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3/01/2008
Are you tracking how Google indexes your site? If you rely on Google as much as most web companies, it is important to see how you are being indexed. You always hear about the dreaded “Supplemental Index” (whether it exist or not) which is a fear for any startup. The supplemental index (SI) is a segment of Google’s index where the pages are in a search engine purgatory. The problem is, there is no way to tell if you have web pages in the SI and worse yet, there is not 100% proof that it exist.
There is hope however. With the proper tracking you can get a good idea of when Google views your site as a positive additional to its index. If you submitted an XML site map in Google’s Webmaster Tools (how-to), you will have an idea of how many URL’s have been submitted to Google. This is not needed for the tracking but will give you an idea of the percentage of URL’s Google is giving you credit for.
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