SEO Advice

I recently launched a new web site that had pre-existing blog software installed on it, similar to this site. After launching this new web site, I noticed Google wasn’t deep spidering the site and after a week, hadn’t indexed any pages other than the home page. My first instinct was that I needed more backlinks pointing to the web site to force Google to do some extensive spidering of the web site. Then I remembered, isn’t this what Sitemaps are for?

Lucky for me, the new web site is developed in Drupal and all I needed to do was install the XML Sitemaps module which took all of about 30 seconds. Once installed, I configured a few options and now have a sitemap.xml file that is updated everytime the content on the web site is updated.

I then added a line to my robots.txt file to notify the search engines of my new sitemap index file which looks like this:

Sitemap: http://www.mydomain.com/sitemap.xml

This is a handy feature called Sitemaps Autodiscovery which was adopted back in April by the big search engines including Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask. You can also use the webmaster tool web interfaces provided by most search engines that allows you to verify your site and then submit sitemaps manually. There is also a way to ping the search engines anytime your sitemap is updated.

Within 12 hours of setting up my sitemap.xml file and submitting it manually to Google, the site:mydomain.com query now has changed to show most of the new web pages rather than all old pages. Woohoo, I am on the road to re-indexing my new web site.