Activities:
- added XML sitemap. I used the Google Sitemap Generator plugin for Wordpress, which is find for the blog but not quite as happy adding too many other non-blog pages, or so it seemed to me. I added other pages by hand a few times and only a couple of them “took” in the sitemap.
- added link to blog footer template
- added new pages related to the next experiment
- changed some blog settings to exclude duplicate content and change default URLs
- added link to home page on unrelated PR3 page, hoping to speed up indexing of all pages
Status:
- Google’s indexing fluctuates wildly. I’ve been checking much more than necessary, but I’ve seen results on the site: operator search fluctuate from 3 to 16 to 23 today.
- Google likes the blog pages more than the rest of the site, in terms of indexing. Despite excluding certain types of page, there’s a lot of duplicate content (ie posts indexed separately under title, tag and category…)
- Links direct from blog posts seem to be influential in getting site pages indexed
- Main site home page was ranking #31 earlier today for the non-quote term “search experiments”; now #34.