Well if you’re using Wordpress then you’re in luck!
Traditionally your new posts and pages won’t get indexed until Google next crawls your site, which for a small site isn’t that often. The larger and more popular the site, the more frequently Google crawls to check for updates and index new pages. So what you want to do, is get links to your new posts onto big frequently-crawled sites the moment they go live.

But How?

Well I’m not going to get too technical here because frankly that’s not what this blog is about and I’ll likely get way out of my depth, but in short what you want to do is ‘ping’ an update service. Which is to say that when you post a new entry you want wordpress to tell some big social networking/rss sites that you have a new post, and that they should take notice.

How To Do it

In your Wordpress administration interface navigate to

Settings > Writing > Scroll To The Bottom > Update Services

You should see a text box filled with the default http://rpc.pingomatic.com/ which is the only service that Wordpress pings by default.

Logically, for Google to find us quicker we want to update as many of these services as possible, so here’s a list of some more that we use here (that have worked very well).

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://bblog.com/ping.php
http://bitacoras.net/ping
http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc
http://blogmatcher.com/u.php
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://blogupdate.org/ping/
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://ping.feedburner.google.com
http://rpc.britblog.com/
http://rpc.newsgator.com/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://rpc.wpkeys.com/
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://trackback.bakeinu.jp/bakeping.php
http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b
http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc

So How Fast Are We Talking?

The record so far? 10 minutes.

I’ve had a couple of new blog posts who’s title I’ve Googled 10 minutes after posting and they’ve popped right up at number 1.

The Benefit?

People find your site, and they find it fast! Particularly if you blog about current events or breaking news of any kind this is a must have! I blogged the day that iPhone was released in the UK and I got indexed so quickly that I was number 1 for ‘O2 iPhone UK’ for a couple of days.

Final Notes

Typically with these posts getting indexed so quickly you may rank very highly for competitive keywords, over time though (a week or two) you should expect these rankings to drop back down to a ‘normal level’ for your site. Clever Google.

So, what’s the quickest you’ve ever had a fresh blog post indexed? Have you used any other techniques that have worked well to speed up the process? Let me know in the comments below!

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So I’ve decided to do a multi-part case study, I’m going to start a new (very simple and un-pretty) website, and I’m going to document every change and piece of work that I carry out on it. Along with each post, I’m going to document benchmarks of where 10 keyphrases rank, and their movement, along with traffic statistics based on organic traffic. I think this will (maybe) be both fun and educational.

Let’s Get Started

The first thing to decide is what the site is going to be about, this was relatively simple (for once) as I didn’t need to think of something particularly catchy or memorable – it’s purely meant to appeal to search engines. So, I have a very sweet Staffordshire Bull Terrier who is what’s known as a ‘blue’ variety of the breed (basically grey, the Kennel Club just make up fancy names). Blue Staffordshire Bull Terriers are generally quite rare and highly sought after, so at least it’s something that I can write some interesting content about.

Step 1 – Register a Domain Name

As mentioned, I have no interest in having a short and catchy domain, and I don’t need any company branding. So I’ve gone for a nice keyphrase-full domain, and picked up: http://www.BlueStaffordshireBullTerriers.co.uk

Step 2 – Do Keyphrase Research

I usually use KeywordDiscovery for my keyphrase research, but recently I’ve also found that the Google Adwords keyphrase tool has actually also proven to be quite useful. I’m going to keep it simple and only collect keyphrase data for ’staffordshire bull terrier’ and ‘blue staffordshire bull terrier’ and their derivatives. So I’ll be working from a list of about 40 and narrowing it down to 10. (Usually I’m working from a final list of 10,000 to be narrowed down to about 400, true story).

Here are the KeywordDiscovery results for “staffordshire bull terriers”

and again for “staffordshire bull terrier”

Interestingly, VERY skewed numbers in favour of the singular form rather than the plural. Also higher search volumes than I anticipated, this could be harder than I first imagined (oops).

Step 3 – Produce a Final List of Key Phrases

So, based on the above lists, here are the 10 which I’m going to go for.

• Staffordshire Bull Terrier
• Stafforshire Bull Terriers
• Staffordshire Bull Terrier Puppies
• Blue Staffordshire Bull Terrier
• Staffordshire Bull Terrier Puppy
• Staffordshire Bull Terrier Dogs
• Staffordshire Bull Terrier Pictures
• Staffordshire Bull Terrier Puppies
• Blue Staffordshire Bull Terriers
• Solid Blue Staffordshire Bull Terriers

I’ve ordered them (as I always do) with the most searched key phrase at the top, and the least searched at the bottom. This works under the assumption that a key phrase which is searched for most in a month, will have the most competition for the top spot, and as such will be most difficult to rank for. The goal is to work your way up from the bottom of the list to the top.

Step 4 – Research The Competition

Obviously if I’m going to rank for any of these phrases then I need to know who I’m up against, so it’s time to google each one of the above key phrases and see what comes up.

Here are the results of the most common sites that appeared in the top 3

• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staffordshire_Bull_Terrier
• www.staffords.co.uk/
• www.staffybullterriers.com/
• www.sbtfun.com/
• www.k9puppy.co.uk/Puppies/StaffordshireBullTerrierforsale.aspx
• www.epupz.co.uk/search/puppies_for_sale.asp?area=all&st=1&breed=Staffordshire%20Bull%20Terrier
• www.bluestaffy.co.uk/

K9Puppy and ePupz (as you might expect) are puppy classified sites, they rank well for pretty much every dog breed name under the sun because they have high Page Rank, and frequently updating content.

Wikipedia is going to be a tough one to beat, but luckily it only showed up on one of the 10 key phrases’ search results, but there also several positive things that we can use this page for. (more to follow)

As for the rest, they’re staffy-fansites. They aren’t well designed, they don’t have any remarkable features (or PR) and the only thing that they really have going for them is domain-name age.

I’m confident that these competitors aren’t a major concern, the ones that I’m most worried about are the money-laundering god-foresaken puppy selling websites.

Step 5 – Play The Waiting Game

The most boring part of all. Wait for your domain registration to go through, then point the domain to the right nameservers, and wait again for it to propagate. If you’re like me and you get bored and frustrated then you might like to check out this tool, which tracks your domain’s progress and sends you an email once it’s finished propagating. (Which I think is rather cool)

Stay tuned for next time, when I’ll be putting together the index page and coding the html for it. Make sure you subscribe to the RSS feed so you don’t miss the rest of the series!

So, do you think this is going to be a success? Or a dramatic failure? Let me know in the comments!

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So where do you start?

Well there are a number of ways that you can go about recovering, but most of them depend on how badly you’ve been affected.

If you’ve noticed a couple of pages drop positions then it may just be a general penalty. The first thing to do here is review your link strategy, do your best not to link to any sites more than 2 page ranks below you, and do not link to anything that is PR1 or lower. (The exception here is a PR of N/A as the site has not yet been through a PR update)

Once you’ve (hopefully) cleaned up your outbound links, you can apply for ‘reconsideration’ in your Google Webmaster Tools account in the form pictured below, whereby you promise to be a good boy/girl from now on.

If you’ve received a manual ban from Google, then it may be best to try the ditch ‘n dash method;

To do this you simply apply a 301 redirect from your site, to all your content on a new domain, this way you keep your PR and power, even your users – but your site is associated with a new domain and not affected by the ban. A word of warning though, if your site was manually banned, then it was for a reason… and Google will see straight through this old trick if you haven’t cleaned up your act!

What exactly is ‘cleaning up your act?’

Well, you’ve been penalised for a reason (intentional or otherwise) and you need to ensure that you not only resolve the initial issue, but also remove anything else on your site that is even slightly dubious.

Here are some points to get started with

• Key phrase saturation – check how many times you’re using key phrases throughout titles, descriptions, meta keywords, page copy, navigation, and baselinks. Too many = spam, and as you may have figured out, Google is not a fan of spam. You can use a keyword density checker to assess whether or not your site is overkill in the key phrase dept.
   
• Hidden elements – are you using css display:none on certain things? or matching any text to the background colour? (you have to be a really special kind of stupid to do that second one) Or maybe you think you’re being really clever by using javascript to mask certain elements of your site, or having different content served to bots vs users. You may think you’re tricking Google, but chances are that you’re really not. As I’ve mentioned in previous articles, real SEO is not spam, and real SEO is not an attempt to trick search engines. So don’t do it!
   
• Inbound links – have you set up a massive network of sites (or social media platforms) that all link back to your site? If so, consider trimming that right down. Overkill on inbound links is the quickest (and most obvious) way to get yourself a penalty. Instead of trying to build thousand of backlinks yourself, write some decent content that people will WANT to link to.
   
• Outbound links – what sites are you linking to? If you’re linking to a site that has just received a PR penalty then it could well have filtered down to you. You need to be meticulous about only linking to high quality sites – as linking to a ‘questionable’ site can seriously damage your reputation amongst the Google spiders.
   
• Still confused? – If you still have no idea why this has happened and to your knowledge, your site is squeeky clean; review Google’s terms of use. They have some pretty detailed information as to what is and isn’t ok, and you should be able to get yourself going in the right direction.

And finally, if you’re still stuck – you’ve done everything you can think of and you still don’t know how to get out of this big hole that you’ve dug for yourself.. drop me a line in the comments and I’ll see if I can help.

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