Can You Get a Website Indexed with No Links and XML Sitemaps?

SEOBizNiche — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 03:35:05 +0000

This weekend I was doing a little housekeeping on some of my domains and hosting accounts and decided to test and see if it was possible to get a website indexed using XML Sitemaps and no external links.Since some piano player in New Jersey owns the domain MichaelGray.com I had a few options but the best was to go with my middle initial and byt the domain MichaelAGray.com. Since Im all about wordpress as a CMS I put the files up, put up my theme of choice thesis, tweaked it with the thesis reputation skin, and installed the XML Sitemaps plugin. I set it up to ping all of the search engines as shown below:

Within 4 days the homepage for the domain was showing in Bing and Google as shown below (yahoo just didnt love me enough)Im a big advocate of using sitemaps, and I think this demonstrates their effectiveness. Unless you have a really small site or really good site architecture, chances are some parts of your website arent as exposed, or well linked as others, and this helps you spoon feed the search engines your content insuring better crawling.

Thats not to say you should use sitemaps and not worry about spiders being able to crawl, because internal anchor text can play a huge role in SEO. However use on XML sitemaps as a redundant backup plan to help make sure you fully crawled and indexed.

Need SEO help with your website, look at my SEO Consulting Services

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis WordPress Theme review.

Go to Source

Bing Starts Indexing Twitter Updates, Sort Of

SEOBizNiche — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 23:35:14 +0000

As real-time search and Twitters growing importance in producing valuable information is getting into the mainstream, Bing is joining the likes of Facebook, Google and Twitter in bringing real-time search feature in their respective search algorithms. Starting today, Bing will be integrating more real-time data into its search results, beginning first with tweets of famous people – bloggers or celebrities.While this may be a welcome development, this new feature is somewhat limiting though. To get the tweets of this prominent people, you will have to construct your search terms like – Name Twitter or Name Tweets or @Name, where name is the Twitter account of the person. The thing is how many famous people use their full name as their Twitter username? Or how many users do their search on web search engine just to get these peoples latest Tweets?

It would have been great if Bing (or the other search engines for that matter) will start indexing the Twitter stream and display Tweets along with the other web data that they crawl and display as search results. Thats more like a real-time search, right?

Anyway, this could be a good start though. As the Bing community blog explained via a post:

Were not indexing all of Twitter at this time just a small set of prominent and prolific Twitterers to start. We picked a few thousand people to start, based primarily on their follower count and volume of tweets. We think this is an interesting first step toward using Twitters public API to surface Tweets in people search. Wed love to hear your feedback as we think through future possibilities in real time search.

Go to Source

SEO BizNiche » Bing

Can You Get a Website Indexed with No Links and XML Sitemaps?

Bing Starts Indexing Twitter Updates, Sort Of