Back after a week or so’s total inattention, and an interesting pattern is emerging. With the power of external links beginning to kick in, the home page for the site is now ranking at #5 in the big G for the familiar phrase. However, all of the non-blog pages appear to have disappeared from the index – at least, those few that were there already. None are currently indexed.
I suspect that this is part of a general fluctuation common with new sites, but I’d make the following observations.
- The blog pages aren’t affected by this. Those that are set to be indexed are there in the big G index.
- Since the last update I’ve introduced an XML sitemap with all URLs in there (which updates with any new blog posts). So far no beneficial effect for non-blog pages.
- Some of the inbound links are showing in G webmaster tools now, but I suspect that this ranking means that all have been taken into account. The most powerful link is on a page that has now been crawled since the link was introduced.
- None of the links is from a page relevant to the subject matter.
- Yahoo is not indexing anything but the homepage at present. Site Explorer is however showing links to pages other than the home page. I’m not quite sure how Y can count links to pages that it doesn’t recognise as indexed.
No firm conclusions as yet. Tentative conclusions are:
- Using a blog platform is better for getting your pages indexed than hand-crafting HTML
- Possibly this effect is helped by tagging, as other sites collate, aggregate and link to posts based on tagging
- It’s easier to get one page to rank for a search term than it is to get a suite of pages into the index
However, at present it is also making it difficult to draw conclusions about either the CSS/picture experiment or the anchor text/noindex experiment.