Search Engine Stats and Google Indexing
With the launch of my site about things to do in Hawaii www.alohaupdate.com I have become obsessed with Google and Yahoo and whether or not they are indexing my sites. This one, erikvossman.com, is going into its 7th week online and got 145 people to visit through search engines this past week. 124 were from Google and 2 from Yahoo, with the rest from MSN, AOL, and some other generic ones. Not bad for a month and a half of being online.
Quick Side-Bar
Have you ever wondered, “How do I know if my site is getting indexed by Google or Yahoo?” Simple, go to your recent visitors section and check for googlebot.com for Google or inktomisearch.com for Yahoo. If they come to your site a lot they should be in your top visitors section. The other search engines have crawlers that index sites but don’t have names associated with their IP addresses, that I know of. You can however do a search for crawler IP addresses and see if all of them are indexing you site. These statistics are available with my hosting company, Netfirms. Only trouble is they offer webstats for all of my sites as one not individual. That means I am not sure which site is being indexed. The free service I am using, addfreestats.com doesn’t show googlebot and only shows inktomisearch once a day if it visits. There are some out there that do but now all of them. Look around and give them a try or check out my article on web stat services.
…Back to it
As I was saying, I check my stats about 5 times a day looking to see if anyone was referred to my site through Google or some other search engine. Submitting them is only half the battle, getting them to index you is the key. In order to build traffic through Google or Yahoo I have been working through strategies such as links, content, and site map submission. One site I have found extremely helpful for SEO (search engine optimization) is entrpreneuers-journey.com. If you need some tips I suggest paying him a visit.
My other method of Blogclicker, blogxchange, etc, I have basically stopped. I am going to stick with Google and quality links as my source to develop traffic. This has brought my overall hits down but unique visitors is climbing every day. I will keep you informed of both sites stats. For now I call out to googlebot to index alohaudpate.com. Let’s hope it happens.
Aloha,
Erik