Blog Search Index
Wednesday October 18, 2006
You have just completed the creation of your new blog, have an Adsense account and it is time to kick back and wait on the revenue to roll in. Just to check things out you decide to search for your blog at Google and much to your dismay your blog is no where to be found in the Google search results. The same thing happens when you check Yahoo and MSN. What could possibly be wrong? Your newly created blog can not be found on the Internet, or at least that is how it appears.
In order for your web site to show up in search engine rankings, the search engines have to crawl the site and index the content. The automated software robots are often referred to as spiders or bots, a shortened version of the term robot. These bots move along through cyberspace following hyperlinks from one web page to the next. As they travel, the bots record and index the links and content found on the web pages they visit. This is a vastly over simplified explanation of the process. The exact methods search engines employ are closely gaurded trade secrets.
Back to locating the invisible blog on the Internet. As it turns out the blog is right where you left it when you clicked the button to create your new literary masterpiece. This can be verified by typing in your url (uniform resource locator) into the window of your browser. If your blog is hosted by Google's Blogger service at blogspot.com in a few hours or days you will be able to type in your url into a Google search box and it should return a link to your blog. The list of results that a search engine displays is known as SERP's or search engine results pages. Since Google owns Blogger and blogs hosted by blogspot feature Adsense ads, it is a pretty safe assumption that your Blogger blog will get indexed by Google. At least after some time if you type your url into a search box a link to you blog will appear.
There is much more to cover on this subject and I will pursure the topic further in additional posts. If you want to learn more about the topic see Search Engine Optimization for Dummies