Blog Update: Getting Indexed by Google, Yahoo & Bing

by Kerry Dean on 11/10/2009 at 5:27 pm in Online Strategies, SEO, SEO Best Practices

Last Tuesday morning (Nov. 3) we launched TheRangeBlog.com. When you move a blog from one domain to another, there are a lot of I’s to dot and T’s to cross. I did what any project manager would do: I came up with a simple checklist. Many of the items are SEO best practices for redirects. In this case, we had to keep in mind the fact that we were moving from one domain to another. Here is what we did:

• We removed the placeholder HTML file for the homepage.
• We removed the disallow entry from the robots.txt file.
• We updated the privacy setting in Wordpress to allow search engine access
• We updated our corporate website to reflect the new blog URL.
• We created and uploaded the 301 redirects from all of the old blog URLs to the counterpart URLs on the new blog domain. [Note: We did not write 1-to-1 redirects for every URL. Due to time constraints, we only created 1-to-1 redirects for the 60 or so blog post URLs. For all other URLs, we created a wildcard redirect that 301'd all URLs to the new blog's homepage. Due to our previous blog's lack of links, I caved on this item. In most other cases, I recommend 1-t0-1 redirects when changing URL structure or moving from one domain to another.]
• We built an XML sitemap for the new blog.
• We created/verified Webmaster accounts with Google, Yahoo and Bing. In these accounts, we submitted our XML sitemap location. All sitemaps were accessed within 24 hours of submission.

All of that took place last Tuesday (3-Nov-2009). Today is November 10, 2009. How have the search engines responded? Let’s take a look at our site counts in Google, Yahoo and MSN Bing:

Google Site Count: 8 URLs indexed

Yahoo Site Count: 1 URL Indexed

MSN Bing Site Count: 49 URLs Indexed

Just in case you cannot see the pictures, here are the results:

• Google: 8 URLs indexed
• Yahoo: 1 URL indexed
• MSN: 49 URLs indexed

That’s amazing to me. In my experience with crawling speed and indexing speed, Google typically wins big. But after a week of TheRangeBlog.com being live and active, Bing is clearly winning the race to index our blog. Nice work, Bing! Thanks for taking note of our blog.

I should also note that our blog has almost no inbounds links. Aside from the links from our corporate site and from a few Range Twitter accounts, we have virtually no link authority. Our lack of inbound link love is obviously playing a role in how quickly our site is getting indexed. But worry not – because we are working on links! (And if you are the linking kind, please consider linking to us. I won’t beg, but I would appreciate any link juice. Well, not from bad neighborhoods. Yes, I am an SEO.)