Thoughts About

Google got me indexed

Wohoo once more. Google got me indexed, so now for the first time I really feel my virtual thoughts are alive :) Everybody who have founded a new site faces this problem: how do you let the world know that you are there? It didn't actually take too long, since I just founded the site around 10 days ago. I submitted the site to Google as the first thing after I got the site up, and then to some other directories and search engines. However, from the stats I could see that I was getting practically no hits. It wasn't until a few days ago when I found this pretty handy website that allows you to submit your site url to several search engines and directories at once. I also turned on PageRank (which I normally don't use) from my Google toolbar. I don't really know which one did the trick to get Google to index me, but there my Thoughts are now. Google really is THE search engine where you need to be. Once you get there, it's just up to you to deliver content useful for others. Some might even argue that Google is becoming a little bit too powerful. I'm not too worried about that though. A search engine in theory is fairly simple to build and there are lots of competitors who'd just love to become the next Google. The competition can only be good for web users.

I noticed that you need to be really careful about setting your meta tags correctly. This site should be fairly secure so that's not a problem, but some of the indexed urls neither "look nice" nor are meant to be indexed at all. A funny thing is that Movable Type doesn't use default meta tags at all in their templates. There are many templates that shouldn't be indexed, so you need to add < meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow" > to various templates and go through all of them to add "description" and "keyword" meta tags to pages you actually want to index.

Boy. It was surprisingly difficult to produce these < > characters in text. Is it absolutely necessary to leave the space there to get MT to allow and convert the characters to URL encoded format, anyone know? Note to self, need to take a look at MT source code sometime. Another point, I've tried to use well formed urls, as you may have noticed. I've also also tried to make the content otherwise as user (and Google) friendly as possible by following the Nine things you can do to make your web site better.

The posted topics have been somewhat light on content, but now I have an actual thought forming up in my head. Maybe I'll mull over it a few more days before posting so I don't look over-enthusiastic.