Following Google Indexing a New Site

[Barry]

I have a new site with a new domain name and thought other members might be interested in how Google indexes this site from the beginning.

The site has been up about two weeks. I submitted sitemaps to Google about 10 days ago. There was a great deal of activity from googlebot as soon as I submitted the sitemaps.

The site has three distinct areas accessed in tree fashion from the home page.

The first page to be indexed was the home page followed a couple of days later by genealogy/index.php, the title page of area 1 with a sitemap.

The following pages appeared next:

Area 2 - html area with sitemap - title page only of area indexed

Area 3 - html area without sitemap - title page only of area indexed

Then followed surnames.php and 6 html pages linked from the home page (I have since placed a no index, no follow tag one one of these, my faq page). Four of these pages were Ancestor Reports (after a suggestion in this forum) of each of our parents.

12 pages in total - will reduce to 11 after 'no index, no follow' kicks in. This doesn't seem like much but all of our ancestors, significant dates and places, and their children are now indexed - probably the most important of all the information we want Google to show.

Also - when I Google Susanna Clemens" 1764 , a child of an ancestor who was born in 1764, then the listing in Google is first out of 66 entries!!

There is no sitemap for the entries linked to the home page.

Conclusions so far:

1. The sitemaps lead to a lot of activity from Google but have not affected the listings - (yet)

2. Html files linked from the home page have a high ranking and are indexed early in the process.

[Barry]

1 more page indexed today (total 12 now) - a page in the one area WITHOUT a site map.

[Clara]

1 more page indexed today (total 12 now) - a page in the one area WITHOUT a site map.

<b>Problem</b> with Google's indexing: it looks like Google's spiders accessed my still-under-construction site from this-here forum. (I'd posted the links to a couple of pages, looking for answers to some technical problems).

And... to make a long story shorter, for reasons that have to do with a big, complicated database (and some 'translation' problems, moving from (several) PAF 2.31 [i <i>like</i> some of the features of that old DOS program] into one 'merged' tree on TNG, I changed the name of my 'main' tree online...

So now - and despite lots of 'hints' that I've left for the googlebots - Google has indexed a few of my static HTML pages, the Adobe javascript page that goes with a couple of the pages that I designed in GoLive... and it's STUCK on those now-defunct URLs from the 'still testing' tree (that's no longer there). [Google "site:anishinaabe.net" to see what I mean]

I dont' want to change the name of 'main' tree again, because of external links...

Does anyone know how to write an .htaccess file redirecting requests for the old-named tree, into the active one?

Or, have another solution to the problem?

tnx

Clara

p.s. (for whatever it's worth: <i>hello, Googlebot!</i>, there's a nice surname list - linked straight from my home page - at http://www.anishinaabe.net/surnames.html.. ... hello?? ... <small>hello??? ... <small>hello.....??? <small>hellooooo..........</small></small></small>

[Barry]

I stopped posting to this thread due to lack of response but to follow up, our site jumped to about 20,000 entries on the third month anniversary of the site and has since settled down to about 7,000 entries.

The four ancestor reports linked from our home page seem to have provided us with a consistent exposure from Google of the most important (to us) people on our site.

It takes a verrrrry long time for a deleted page to disappear from Google (don't even think about changing a directory name )

Cheers

[Clara]

I stopped posting to this thread due to lack of response but to follow up, our site jumped to about 20,000 entries on the third month anniversary of the site and has since settled down to about 7,000 entries.

The four ancestor reports linked from our home page seem to have provided us with a consistent exposure from Google of the most important (to us) people on our site.

It takes a verrrrry long time for a deleted page to disappear from Google (don't even think about changing a directory name )

Cheers

> a verrrrry long time

yep. I deleted a whole slew (4,300+) HTML genealogy pages from my website, after getting TNG up-and-running, replaced them with a .htaccess file in that directory, redirecting to a page with a 'search' box into my TNG site and an announcement that the long-awaited database was up-and-running.

the deletion was joyful: as my first effort at getting those genelogies online I'd used a 'freeware' program with peculiar Franglish, frames, and graphic design that I didn't like very much... but it's a <i>lot</i> of trouble to change 4,300+ pages. I was so glad to get rid of them, that I deleted them from my home computer too, and emptied the 'recycle' bin, and figured that I would never again have to be publicly identified with fractured Franglish genealogies.

so: the page-ranking of all those deleted pages <i>climbed</i> dramatically during the month they were randomized into the nether regions of cyberspace - at one point got to #2 in Google rankings for the entire category "Ojibwe" and I got more 'hits' than ever on them...

finally... and mostly because I ran across some links to those pages from people to whom - from the websites - it seemed they made a positive 'difference' (and they weren't using the TNG database), I regenerated all those HMTL pages and put them back online, although with a notation that they are <i>not</i> updated, and please check out the new online database.

so my Google ranking fell back to twenty-something, and the 'hits' on those non-existent pages declined once they were <i>there</i> again...

(I cherish the improbability of the Universe. )

- - -

& as a follow-up about the friendly local 'bots': after I posted the 'hello, robots, are you there?' comments above, it took about an <i>hour</i> for Google to add my 'surname' list to its listing for my site. Cache include only surnames A-C, and is dated from an 'April 15' web-crawl: it seems it takes their indexing system awhile to 'digest' new pages...

[Barry]

I updated the gedcom recently and the number of pages jumped from 7000 to 26000 so Google must like to see a site with new material rather than a static site.