If an RSS Feed is the Yahoo Backdoor,
is a Blog Google's?
By Tinu AbayomiPaul (c) 2004
Though the answer is in a book I wrote this July,
the question is still asked of me repeatedly. Why does it work
for some sites and not others? And how come some blogs get indexed
in a day and then are dropped, and others stay in Google indefinitely?
Well, let's take one question at a time. The answer
to whether you can blog your way into Google search results is
yes, sometimes in six weeks, often in 24 hours.
Yes, you read right, in less than 24 hours. Under
certain conditions, the search engines actually want you to succeed
at this.
I'm aware that these statements may cause some
controversy, but that won't make them any less factual. Since
September, Google has been set up to show you proof of this, which
we'll go over in part two. My new blog has been spidered and indexed
daily since it was created.
Not only is this possible with your blog, the
way that blogs are set up make them one of the most conducive
web site mediums to attract more traffic from multiple sources
quickly. The trick to getting this to work for you, is in understanding
which conditions have to be met first.
And we'll come back to that shortly. First let's
talk about what's typically wrong with the process most people
take to get their sites listed.
Most people submit their sites to Google and wait
six to eight weeks to see if they were included. Other people
know that the fastest way to be spidered is to leave your link
at a site that is already getting spidered.
But even among those people, when they don't see
their site in Google exactly the way they'd like, they give up,
and say it didn't work.
So what went wrong?
The place that the majority of people go wrong
is in trying to trick the Googlebot into thinking their site matches
its standards for inclusion for their desired high traffic keyword,
instead of aligning themselves with the purpose that the
search engine fills.
You may think that if you study all the search
engine tricks, you'll have the traffic from the search engines
and it will then follow that yours will be the site people come
to for the keyword they want, which in turn, will get 1% of those
people to buy what's at your site.
If you think that, I'm not here to tell you that
you're wrong - sometimes that works. I'm just saying that there
are other easier, faster, less expensive ways. Some of them only
have subtle differences from the way you know.
The truth is, even if we could somehow reverse
engineer the secret Google algorithm, it periodically changes.
So mastering that system would be temporary, even if you could
do it.
Did you know that you don't even need the traffic
for your most desired keyword to be successful? You just need
some targeted traffic that converts well.
Some of the most financially successful sites
generate amazing profits in the tens or hundreds of thousands
with a few hundred or thousand visitors every month.
The method I most suggest to get the kind of search
engine results that can power those kinds of sales, is aligning
your site with the purpose the search engine seeks to fill. It
is faster, more effective and involves far less effort.
You should still make sure your blog meets all
the basic search engine optimization guidelines. However, the
very nature of a blog makes it easier to meet more of these requirements
with less continual struggle.
Let's look at the facts, and see how blogs align
themselves more closely with one of Google's purposes as a search
engine.
Here's what you need to keep in mind:
1- if you get your site's link in the path of
the search engine spider or robot of your choice, in this case
Googlebot, it may follow it.
2- the way to get it to follow the link is to
make sure it can "see" your link.
3- if your content fills a need that the search
engine's database of links has, it will include your link, and,
4- if your link fills a deficit better than any
other site, in accordance with Google's secret formula or algorithm,
it will rank your page well.
So now, the only missing component necessary to
our success is finding out how to be the best site Google finds
for a category that has a deficit.
One of the strengths of Google, as perceived by
people who like it, is the vast amount of fresh content it contains
that is relevant to almost any topic, or keyword, typed into it,
no matter how narrow or broad.
It follows then, that one purpose of this database
of links is to provide fresh, relevant content on topics
its users desire.
The freshest, most relevant, most topical information
found on the web today are in blogs, as well as their corresponding
RSS or Atom feeds.
A blog's very function is to contain constantly
updated focused content, on one topic or field.
When blogs first started, the topic was often
a person's life. Business blogs, instead, are updated records
of a certain kind of information relevant to an industry, a company
or a topic, aligned with the interests of their visitors.
So you need to know the following things in order
to get your blog included on Google's search engine results pages.
- Where to leave your link so that it will get spidered
- How to make sure Googlebot sees your link
- How to set up your blog so its content fills a deficit
- The best way to make sure your blog does this better than
other sites.
There's a specific formula of success for this,
one of many that will work not just one time, but repeatedly.
We've run out of space for the moment, but part
two picks up with the specifics of how your blog needs to
be set up and how to determine exactly where Googlebot can find
your link.
Article by Tinu AbayomiPaul. Learn more about
the Google - Blog connection at http://www.freetraffictip.com/gb
