Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Revisiting the web site

Will she never shut up about this? One last post, I beg you. This is an interesting tip, actually, for anyone working on their site with a deadline in mind.

Do it at least six weeks before you expect anyone to google it!

My site has been up since the end of January, and it's only today that it's finally appearing on Google. Yahoo picked up on it a bit sooner. Google's info says something waffly along the lines of it might take 'some time' for Google to crawl a new site. I thought that meant hours or days. Imagine my horror when He Who Knows About These Things, i.e. Conduit, explained that meant weeks or months. I had worked hard on the website knowing that my agent would soon be sending out the submission and I wanted my site to pop up when editors googled me. Bah. Guess I missed out on that, then! (Although I did give my agent the address and there have been some visits that I cannot link to friends and family).

Moral of the story, just one more time: if you're creating a website with a specific goal or deadline in mind, be sure to add a couple of months to your timeline if Google-ability is important to you.

6 comments:

Robin S. said...

Good to know, McK. I've heard there's a way to have it moved up more quickly - but I'll find out, if you'd like.

Blogless Troll said...

Yeah, there are some tricks to get its Google-ability up to speed quicker, putting something in headers or crap like that, but I don't what they are.

McKoala said...

Info in headers is supposed to help; that's all in. Google say themselves that sending them a site plan helps, but I couldn't find clear instructions on how to do that, so I just waited it out.

McKoala said...

Links from other sites to yours make a difference too. I had lots of links going out, but only one coming in, so that probably didn't help!

Stuart Neville said...

Your site's very cleanly structured, so now Google's picked it up, it should fo fairly well.

I've had a link to yours from my site since it first went live, I think.

McKoala said...

Yup, you are my link! You are aptly named.

My home page is at the top of Google now; ahead of an estate agent with a similar name.

Actually, I'm not sure I linked back to you. How ungrateful. I'll get on to that.