search engine pinging
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As you start to get pages up do some search engine pinging. Do it early on, when building your website. It makes sure search engines find you and spider you. Use pinging to submit your home page and sitemap page (if you have one) to the search engines. You can check your status with Google here: site status checker. pinging Google
Some web hosts, like SBI!, ping Google for you. To ping Google yourself log in to Google Webmaster Tools (you will need a Gmail account, which you can set up for free). From time to time the protocol changes, but now they have an "Add a site" button right mid screen - click on it. A box appears with "Enter the URL of a site you'd like to manage." Do that and click Continue. You might get this message: "Copy the meta tag below, and paste it into your site's home page. It should go in the <head> section, before the first <body> section." Paste this bit of html code into the header of the html file of web page you are submitting (the index file if you're submitting the home page). You may need to go into a file manager rather than a web design software to do this. This is so Google can verify that you're submitting your own web site, and not someone elses. Do this, leaving Google tools open. Then submit. You might get a message saying it already knows about and has indexed some pages of your site - all well and good. You might get a message telling you your file wasn't vertified, or something similar. Log out and go back a bit later, you'll quite probably find your web page is now verified. Submitting a Sitemap to Google
This is actually not difficult and worth doing so that Google knows about more of your pages. There are various ways to do this. Some web hosts, like SBI!, provide you with a sitemap .xml file, then all you need to find its name. This file is the one for submitting to the other search engines too, .xml being an industry standard format (although you can submit a .txt file to Yahoo! now too). If you don't for some reason have a a .xml file then for Google you can provide a simple text file, but you'll need a .xml file for the other search engines. Of course if you have many urls then you need to find a way of getting a .xml file too, using other software if your host doesn't make you one automatically. There are various free tools available, this one tells you about the Google Sitemap Generator. If you want to make a text file it should contain one URL per line. For example: http://www.example.com/file1.html Fully specify the URLs as Google tries to crawl them exactly as provided. Don't forget the leading http:// Text files can contain up to 50,000 URLs! If your site includes more than 50,000 URLs (then you've been busy!), then separate the list into multiple files and add each one separately. You can name the text file anything you like but you must use UTF-8 encoding, which you can specify when you save the file (in Notepad, this is listed in the Encoding menu of the Save As dialog box). Give the file a .txt extension (e.g. sitemap.txt). Upload the text file to your server, probably using the file manager of web host. Once you've created the file submit it as a Sitemap using Google Webmaster Tools (you need a gmail account, which is free). Make sure you have added and verified the sites in your Webmaster Tools account (i.e. pinged google already from that account). On the Webmaster Tools home page click on the site you want. Then click on Site configuration and Sitemaps. In the text box, complete the path to your Sitemap (for example, if your Sitemap is at http://www.example.com/sitemap.txt, type sitemap.txt, for http:///www.mywebsite/sitemap.xml type sitemap.xml). Click Submit Sitemap. pinging Yahoo!
You will need a yahoo account - which you sign up for free if you don't yet have one (you can use same name and password as yfor our Yahoo email if you have one). Go to: https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/ Add your site where indicated. You will then be asked to sign in, and then you will see this message: "To authenticate your site ownership, you can either add a META tag to your home page, or upload a verification file to your site, please follow the instructions below. How would you like to authenticate your site?" Choose which you like. I choose adding the tag, as for Google pinging. Leave the Yahoo! page open while you do it. The META tag must be within and near the beginning of the first <HEAD> section of the page, and before the first <BODY> section - don't forget to save your changes. Use your file editor to do it. Then click on the ready to authenticate in Yahoo! You will then see a message like this with appropriate key numbers: "Your site has been authenticated. If you have added the META tag, please keep the tag <META name=\"y_key\" content=\"*************\" > in your site's home page. We will revalidate your site ownership by checking this META tag regularly. If you have uploaded the verification file, please keep the file y_key_*******.html on your site root http://www.yourwebsite.com and do not change the content (***********************). We will revalidate your site ownership by checking this file regularly." That's it - done. If you choose to upload a verification file to your site, you fist download it to your desktop, then upload it to your site. This too is not difficult. To submit your xml Sitemap to Yahoo!: Or... Go to https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit and log in. pinging Ask and Bing (formerly Live Search)
To submit sitemaps to Bing or Ask type into the browser in the following formats: http://www.bing.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?siteMap=http://www.my-site.com/sitemap-name.xml http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http://www.my-site.com/sitemap-name.xml |
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