Yep, the gossip for 2010 is that Google will be taking a close look at your site’s page load time and this will effect organic rankings.
There was what I consider to be some bad SEO advise being given out in the RE Blogosphere a little over a year ago. It had to do with the idea of being penalized for having a blogroll in your sidebar. The advise was to create a blogroll page and move your blogroll to that page and out of your sidebar.
A couple of month ago I upgraded the lab to WP 2.6. You will remember I wasn’t to happy with what was going on at the time. I’m still finding some issues but for the most part have learned to live with it.
I’ve also upgraded three other blogs to WP 2.6.1 in the past week.
Google Sitemap Generator
When I upgraded the lab I also upgraded the Google sitemap generator from 2.7.1 to the current version 3.1.0.1 A couple of days later while checking my Google webmaster tools, specifically the sitemap, I stopped breathing when I saw out of 175 pages there were only 9 indexed. It took less than the time of a speeding bullet to reach the end of a gun for me to run a quick site search and discover they were really all there.
I also started getting WARNING messages about pages not being able to be found, lots of them. I’ve not done anything about it. I probably should have, till now that is.
All the other blogs were reporting normal stats and no warning messages, TILL TODAY! I upgraded on Monday and today they are all showing similar results ALL BUT ONE. The one blog still reporting accurately I did not upgrade. I’ve just set the other blogs back to the 2.7.1 version of Google Sitemap Generator.
I’m hoping in a few day the error and WARNING messages will go away and things will return to LOL “normal”.
Have you checked on your Google Sitemap lately?
We get busy. It happens. I know because it happens to me. I have a routine I usually go through at the start and the end of the day. It varies little, making sure everything is up and running for the hours I’m shut down.
Sometimes though a piece of that routine gets clipped. Maybe it isn’t checking the hittail search results for a few days. Sometimes it isn’t logging into the Google Webmaster Tools and that is the one I want to encourage you to check daily.
I use a Google sitemap generator plugin which generates a new sitemap with every new post and pings Google. I still manually submit it most of the time, but not always. It had been several days since I had checked the Webmaster Tools and I was surprised when I logged in to find the Lab’s sitemap had ERRORS!.
I had just published a post which would generate a new sitemap so I hand submitted it. A few minutes later it came back with ERRORS and a strong suggestion to verify the sitemap before submitting it again.
I loaded the sitemap file into a browser and it showed errors as well. Rather than try and spend time finding them, which I would if I had too, I went to the plugin option page and hand generated a sitemap. This one validated and I submitted it. In a few minutes it returned a status of OK.
But what if I hadn’t checked. What if my sitemap was sitting out there for weeks or a month and had errors in it. Probably a glitch during the read write. But whatever the cause it isn’t a good thing to overlook.
Sometimes it is the nail in the tire that brings the whole car to a halt.
This is the Monday morning reminder. Put this on your list “Check Google Webmaster Tools” and don’t forget routine maintenance is as important as increasing performance.
I was in my Google Webmaster Tools yesterday clicking around as the PR update continues to make its way from data center to data center. I’ve often found a correlation between PR updates and “New Google Toys” to play with in the Webmaster Tools. Content Analysis with emphasis on Meta Tags and more.
Google went away from the supplemental indexing or at least from reporting the supplemental results. Which left some of us wondering what might be going on. Personally I like having everything in the index or at least most pages and post are doing better these days.
ReBlogWorld 2010
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.Yeah Right !
