First, some creepy technofascist stuff. Google (along with the other engines) uses "spiders" to "crawl" around the web, moving link to link, searching and mapping the Internet. They don't look at your actual blog; they subsist entirely on your HTML. Unfortunately, we actually want to attract these insidious monstrosities to our blogs. Search engines don't search the Internet itself; they search an index their spiders have made for them. And so we must learn to dance their dance if we want to get our content out there.
The big websites are crawling with spiders, but out here among the stars, they're few and far between. To attract their attention, you have to set off a flare. That's what "pinging" is. It's jumping up and down and waving your hands. If your site is hosted by GoDaddyLongLegs or whatever, they'll do that for you (I'm pretty sure that's right). If all you've got is a lowly Blogger blog, you're on your own.
So here's a few beginning steps to lure those arachnids your way.
First, go to your PC's Start Menu, click on Run, and then enter "cmd" and hit return or press OK. This opens up the command prompt window. This is how you talk to your computer directly, without an operating system (Windows XP or Vista or whatever) to get in the way. Type the following (if you have a Blogger blog; obviously, "yourblognamehere" is a placeholder):
"ping www.yourblognamehere.blogspot.com"
Ok, you just pinged yourself. How does it feel?
What your computer just did was to send a tiny packet of data to your blog and back. It took less than a tenth of a second. If that website didn't exist, it wouldn't work. (I just tried http://www.seahorse-magistrate.com/ and the ping failed.)
Next, you want to ping Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc., with your blog URL (your web-address). I'm going to stick to Google for the moment; there's a simple form that you can use to submit your URL for crawling/indexing. You can find it here. Just type in your URL, verify that you're not an android, and Google will come and check out your site. Sometimes it can take a while, and they say that they won't guarantee that your site will actually get indexed, but it didn't take that long for me to be able to Google "realitysand" and find my blog.
(In fact, a Google search for "Tucson Sentinel Green Party" comes up with my post about the Sentinel's non-coverage of the Green Party as #5!)
Here's the problem, though; your site is indexed now, but how will Google know when you post new content? You're still not big enough for the spiders to remember where you are. That's where pinging comes in. There are several (free) web services that will ping to tons of different search engines and blog listings for you, but as far as I've been able to tell, you have to actually go to their websites every time you update your blog. But if you only update your blog infrequently, this shouldn't be too much extra work.
So here's how you do it: go to one of these free sites (Pingoat and Pingomatic worked for me; Autopinger is supposed to have more coverage, but I kept getting error messages when I tried to register on their site). Pretty much all you have to do is enter your blogname and URL. Then, bookmark or add to Favorites on your web browser; you can either add them to your Favorites Bar or create a separate folder under Favorites. Each time you update your blog, just click on that link and it'll start pinging for you all over again.
Check out the Blog Doctor for more. This is an old post, so some of the links no longer work, but it's a good starting place nonetheless.
No comments:
Post a Comment