A few weeks ago, caseyhen wrote an article on how Twitter can improve indexation, which referred to my previous post on a similar topic. This in turn inspired me to further thinking about off-site methods of improving or speeding up indexation. I came to a conclusion – that we seem to be searching too far. There is a tool that was available long before Twitter was invented, and can similarly improve the frequency of Googlebot visits. It is Blogger.com.
First of all, I would like to share some facts that I learned while using blogs on Blogger.com.
The first one is that posts published on blogs using Blogger are indexed almost instantaneously. I checked more than 20 posts published on various high quality blogs (like http://blog-budowlany.blogspot.com) with PageRanks ranging from 0 to 3. Indexation of new articles takes from a few seconds to no more than 2 minutes. What is worth mentioning, new pages are visible not only using “site:post_URL” query, but also appear within the top 10 of search results for phrases connected with their topic. By the way, it’s amazing how quickly search results are now updated!
Second interesting fact is that while it takes seconds to index new posts, it takes days to index changes within the content (including titles). When you make a change to one of the posts (no matter how fresh it is) it takes up to several days for Google to re-index it. This implies that either it is much more important for Google to fetch fresh content as quickly as possible to build mostly up-to-date search results and limit resources to refreshing the content of pages themselves or Googlebot uses the Blogger database only for finding new posts, while it uses simple link-by-link indexation and general refresh rules in other cases.
The experiment
Knowing these facts, I ran an experiment that was aimed at checking how this quick indexation of new posts can be used for improving indexation of non-blogger pages. I started with creating a new blog and acquiring a few links to make sure Google knew about it (http://wiadomosci-budowlane.blogspot.com – it is a little bit spammy, so I have not linked it here 🙂 ). Then I set up automatic article posting via e-mail. These posts contained the first few words from ads published on one of my classifieds websites (http://www.budowlanki.pl/) together with a link to a specific ad details page which contained a sequence of characters that was not used on the website (to distinguish landing pages for Google). There was one such post published each daily.
The average time between posting an article and Googlebot visiting the linked page was 91 minutes (taking data from 87 days). What is more interesting, the time of indexation fluctuated during the whole experiment. There were days with averages above 200 minutes and ones with the time of indexation not exceeding 5 minutes.
I think, that these differences are caused by the short history and weak quality of the blog. We may assume that for high quality posts (at least written manually 🙂 ) and higher link popularity of the blog the average time to first Googlebot visit for links included in posts will be quite constant, and pretty close to the minimum values presented above – 3-5 minutes. Please remember that the blog which I ran this test on has OSE Authority of only 26/100 and the total number of linking domains was only 6.
This makes blogs working on Blogger an excellent tool for increasing the speed of indexation for important content. Announcing new products or articles, or writing about some niche pages, not yet indexed can significantly improve their indexation.
