There are literally thousands upon thousands of blogs on the internet. There are blogs about every niche imaginable. As such, there is a great deal of competition out there. Bloggers all have a variety of techniques they use to obtain traffic. However, most people agree that nothing beats organic, natural, search engine traffic.
Blogs and web pages are picked up regularly by Google and ranked in order of relevance. Google crawls some blogs more quickly than others, depending on relevance, backlinks, etc. The pages that are indexed quickly referred to as “authority” pages. If you want your blog to be indexed quickly, you need to increase its relevancy and value.
Here are a few tips for optimizing your blog so that Google will crawl it more often:
- Publish new unique blog posts as aften as possible. At least twice a week. Web pages with duplicate content are indexed very slowly, if at all. The content should be informative, beneficial to your reader, have some targeted keywords (a keyword ratio of under 2%), and consist of no “fluff” or “padding”.
- Optimize even the images on your blog. Don’t just label them as “pic1.jpg” or “pic2.gif”, describe what they are. You should also name each image as an important keyword. Read this post on the best way to optimize your images: How To Optimize Your Images for Improved Search Engine Optimization
- Make sure your posts are internally interlinked (i.e. link from one blog post to another). The Insights plugin makes this task easier. And ensure you use the correct anchor text to link from one blog post to another.
- Turn on the trackback and pingback options for every single post. Many people don’t realize the importance of this, especially in regards to a Google crawler. With these options on, you will be directing a Googlebot to crawl and find your new posts. Use the MaxBlog Ping Optimizer plugin.
You can see exactly how to set up the plugin here: Increase blog traffic
- Try getting as many quality backlinks from relevant sites as possible. Two ways to do this is via commenting and publishing guest posts on relevant sites
- Keep your URLs simple, yet effective. Long, complicated URLs take longer to find and index. You need to make them easy to remember and to the point.
- There is some dispute as to whether black hat SEO methods are worthwhile. While using such methods probably will get your blog indexed quickly, they’re extremely risky and your blog can end up being banned. It’s therefore safer to use white hat methods (mentioned above), as they will ensure that your blog will be indexed more quickly over time.
In summary, you can get Google to crawl your blog more quickly by making it as search engine friendly as possible. This means all of your URLs need to be organized, your content needs to be unique, the keywords need to fit in naturally and not overstuffed, etc. Google loves authority websites, so try to make yours as relevant as possible.
What tips do you have to make Google crawl your blog more often? Share them in the comments below.
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I can attest to the effectiveness of your tip #2 on images as I have a static site getting regular traffic from Google image search. I never heard until now about your tip on turning on trackbacks, I didn’t know it has SEO benefits. Thanks for that.
Carl,
You are welcome…I hope the tips make a difference.
Andrew
Hey..thnkxx i m learning a lot from here which I will apply on my blogs..
best seo optimzed posts have
H1, h2, h3 keyword
pics alternate text
atleast 200 words with keyword bold..
Tags that are more appropiate,, better research google adword..
I would agree with you except I think you need to aim for at least 300 words.
Andrew
Never tried optimizer plugin. Is it really necessary ? I always try my best to reduce the use of plugins.
Nasif
Only if you do lots of edits of posts.
Andrew
You show many ways, it’s a good tips, Thanks! Usually I just use the “lazy-way”, that is making a few quality backlink or just dropped comments on a good site/blog
Ron,
It really depends upon how old your blog is as well. If it has a decent number of posts and Google sees you are regularly updating, Google will come back very quickly.
Andrew
Getting your blog crawled or indexed by Google quickly isn’t that complicated, I think. One just needs to find out how Google crawls and indexes different websites. Then go where Google is likely to be indexing.
Kevin,
Not easy?
You make it sound hard.
How do you find out how Google crawls and indexes different websites?
And how do you know where to go where Google is likely to be indexing?
Andrew
My thoughts exactly! Nobody knows how the algorithm of Google works when they crawl and index sites. It’s their trade secret. There may be products out there that promises you to rank to the top of Google overnight but that’s totally baloney. Nothing beats organic search engine traffic.
Great practical tips you got here Andrew and I hope you don’t mind. I want to include this awesome post in my blog carnival for my readers to see. I will tweet you once I got it published on my blog.
Ramcel
Please incude in your blog carnival – would be great.
I’ll also add your blgo carnival to my weekly submissions.
Thanks.
Andrew
Hi Andrew,
Its gone Live and I’ve tweeted you! You can check the blog carnival at this link:
Bunch O’ Blogs
Thank you and please do include my blog on your weekly submissions.
Hello Andrew,
Can you give us some information on how to do interlinking internal post? is this something to do with HTML configuration or can you do this off wordpress directly?
Thanks
Irene
Check out this blog post of mine:
https://www.webuildyourblog.com/2613/internal-links-make-easy-wordpress-plugin/
Andrew
This is very true. Google have a very good set of criteria in their search engine to index the relevance of blogs according to searches. If your blog is having a lot of traffic and page rank, it opens up into a business opportunity.
you also can resubmit your sitemap to Google , Google will crawl again if they found something new on your website or blog.
You may download seo powersuite to ping Google.
The more frequent you update your content , the more frequent google will crawl your website
Thanks for the tips. Unfortunately, I’ve done most of these already. I guess it’s time I go through my blog and eliminate less relevant posts.
My blog has not been crawl for over a month now an i have quality contents on it. I don’t know what the problem might be.
You made mention of quality backlink? Please do you recommend any website for this?
Azubuike
You should read my blog post about back links:
https://www.webuildyourblog.com/2121/build-backlinks-11-methods/
Andrew
I am presently using a blogspot.com domain and want to switch over to a custom domain, should i go ahead adding backlinks on my present blog?
Azubuike
No…not if you intend to switch and have a new domain name.
Andrew
Thanks, for these tips…I think Google will now start crwaling my blog more often and starting indexing my articles.
What a brilliant post. You should do a series! :)I did a sort of blogging for dummies over
on one of the craft forums and I thought it was too simple for them, but the amount of
emails I got asking questions just like what you addressed was unbelievable. As young
people today we have grown up with computers, but it’s easy to forget that even people just a few years older have not! Really good post! 🙂
Shah
I think there is a big market for ‘going back to basics and writing for newbies.
Andrew
Regularly adding new content and optimizing images are useful strategies as is on page SEO (internal linking). The latter is something many bloggers are obviously unaware of given the number of articles I read on sites that have no internal linking at all.
Jonathon
Internal linking is a must these days.
I’m also surprized by how many blogegrs don;t use that.
Andrew
I agree but then again these days most SEO discussions center around getting back links and various schemes to beat Mr G.
Jonathon
Not sure if we will evert beat Mr G! Just slightly behind!
Andrew
Yeah, i think the more you get backlinks, the more you’ll rank in google..but I really don’t know for sure..it’s really confusing for me sometimes ..maybe it also depends on the keywords you use so people would visit your site..
Rey
It very much depends on the keywords you use. You have to do keyword research to pick out the best ones for your niche.
Andrew
Hi Andrew,
Thanks for all the help. Great site :0)
I wondered if you could help me… I’ve just started a site where I give away freebies. But I’ve been putting Amazon ads at the end of each post, as part of the post. Do you think this prohibits a Google crawl? I’ve been adding two to three posts per day for just under a month and I’ve not been crawled yet. I submitted my blog address to Google about a week ago. I’ve linked from my regular blog and from my partner’s blog. And I’m getting a few visitors from Twitter, but only 20 or so per day. Is it just early days? Or should I take the Amazon html away from the posts?
Petra
I don’t think it has anything to do with the Amazon ads.
I just built a site for a client yesterday…full of Amazon ads and it was indexed by Google within hours.
Are you using WordPress?
Andrew
Hi Andrew,
Thank you for answering. I’m using Blogger. I’ve taken the ads out of the posts now and Google seems to have indexed the last couple of posts, at last. Many thanks for your help and all the advice you supply here 🙂
Petra
Perhaps Goolg treats Blogger different to WordPress. I’m sure they do!
Andrew
Google loves fresh content and hence it is the 1st search engine to crawl content on my blog within a few minutes of publishing also Google loves backlinks which contribute to a higher PageRank which is crawled often. Thanks for sharing the tips Andrew. 🙂
thanks for sharing this information >From several days my website postings is going too late to crawl for your valuable tips i will try to decrease that length of taking time
thanks for u r suggestions that will helped me a lot
once again THANKS FOR SHARING THIS INFORMATIOn
Hi Mr. Andrew,
Nice post/Blog, I’m on learn SEO/IM, your blog give so many tips to support SEO/IM, thanks for sharing.Thanks ya, Erni
To get indexed quicker, use Google friendly code and keep a well structured HTML.
Also ping your posts each time they are published
Just writing fresh relevant content 3 to 5 times a week should be enough in my opinion. But as a newbie blogger, try to at least add new RELEVANT content no less than 5 days for the week….worst case scenario do it every other day. And remember good grammar. No gibberish!
Wayne
All good advice!
Now all it takes is action!
Andrew
I agree with this tip “Keep your URLs simple, yet effective”. Thank you for sharing I’ve got a lot of ideas from the post as well as from the comments.
pretty neat tips for a blogger like me . the content is the most importantly to be updated daily without fail, i plan to interlink posts !! from now on. thanks!!1
By adding a Sitemap, you are simply helping Google to Crawl your Posts/Images Better. But keep in mind that Google will add and display only those results in it’s Search Engine which it feels suitable, though it will crawl all the available URLs.
Great article helps me to unerstand a lot better what can bring back Google bots more regular. I have recently learnt that using the header editor in wordpress an bold/italic font can increase optimisation of your blog. Hope that is helpful!
Gary
I’m not convinced bold/italic will make that much differnece but every little bits helps, I suppose!
Andrew
Keep your URLs simple, yet effective i think this is best way to avoid Penalty from Google in this time of PANDA 🙂
Hey, my blog is taking too much of time to update in google search after changing the domain, any idea for faster crawling mechanism
Yes…follow the tips in this blog post!
Andrew
Setting up an RSS feed button on your blog makes it easy for your loyal readers to not just read your blog but also know when you publish new content.
1. Make your blog use Search Engine Friendly component
2. Use Dedicated IP
Wow, nice article here. SEO Friendly images? I never think of it. Thanks Andrew, I like to try it in my wordpress. 🙂
Thanks a lot. I am very happy, i followed all your tips and they worked for me.
I have also changed from blogspot.com to a custom domain and moved to wordpress too just as i stated in my previous comments.
Azubuike
Are you pleased that you have moved to WordPress?
Andrew
Yes i am very much please and have no regrets about that, wordpress rocks!
Daily updation of content on your site is very very important and if the site have inbound links than it is very beneficial for the site.
Ajay
I am going to disagree with you…you don’t need daily updates on your blog. Three times a week is enough.
Andrew
Great information you have given in your this post thanks for sharing because i think crawling is very necessary part of any website or blog. Google crawl our website and give it rank or where it stand current time. Very good advice you have given how we can improve our website for better crawling or Google friendly.
Thanks again
This is very useful to me, thank you. Just a question: I can’t update my blog 3 times a week as you say, this means that my blog will never get good traffic?
Milena
What is your definition of good traffic?
And it depends upon how often you do publish, how great they are and what niche they are in.
Plus numerous other factors like backlinks, social media…
Andrew
I wanted to see how to get higher page rank for your website. These techniques are effective but major concern for me in SEO is my page rank which is 1 for more than 5 months. I want to have higher page rank,can you tell me how much quality/quantity of quality can turn page rank from 1 to 3 and in how much time?
Musaddique
I created a blog recently that got a PR3 within 3 weeks.
You need good unique content and high quality backlinks.
Andrew
Thanks for the tips. As a new blogger who just started in January of this year, I’m still trying to figure out the SEO stuff. I have zero experience int he tech world.
Question: I had no idea there was a difference between wordpress(dot)com and wordpress(dot)org. I’m on the .com side of the house and can’t use plug-ins. Do you think it’s worth my time trying to find ways to optimize the .com site, or pay someone to help me transfer everything to a .org?
Thanks,
-Mentu
Professor
Whether you mobe to wordpress.org, very much depends upon your appraoch to your website.
If you are serious about it, I would move to wordpress.org now before your site gets too big and popular.
Andrew
If you optimize our blog using interlink and ping tools then what is the chance of getting penalty in google panda and penguin updates.
Sajjal
I don’t believe internal linking or pinging will cause any problems with Panda or Penguin.
Andrew
Is it necessary to have more than one page in your blog.I just have one eventhough I have more than 122 original posts.How can one evaluate the quality of the content? I am getting decent pageviews for most of my posts.What do u think of the situation?? pls reply
Anand
You would have to check your bounce rate and the amount of time people stay on your site.
Andrew
Yes very true indeed. The more subscribers you have to Google, the more people will be able to see your website through their Google Reader as well, so not only will Google crawl your site more, but you’ll get additional visits from your subscribers.
great post
faced that problems many times
tell me a good method to get backlinks
Divas,
Check out my popular backlinking post:
https://www.webuildyourblog.com/build-backlinks-11-methods/
Andrew
i think the properly optimized images can bring up to a quarter of your traffic. i had really significant traffic sometime 2 years ago on my website simply because of one image!
I am only a rookie and I have a blog set up for capturing local seo for my pest control business. My blog is http://blog.rodentguys.com/wordpress.
I have submitted about 3K pages to in my wordpress with “spun” content. Google is slowly indexing the pages. In about 6 weeks we have reached 437 pages. In Google Webmaster is says “We didn’t detect any issues with non-indexable content on your site.”
Any thoughts. LOL – please dont be to technical, I am a pest control operator who can not afford to pay for someone to the work, so I am trying to learn on my own.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Nick,
I would check your sitemap.
Does your sitemap have all of the 3K pages included and have you added your sitemap to your Google Webmasters tools?
Andrew
Thanks for replying. Yes I have the 3K pages in the sitemap. In Google Webmaster it says 3700 pages or so submitted and now 477 indexed.
Does submitting the pages too fast effect the submittal? I have pages that are similar but spun really good (I think).
I have no less than word in each sentence spun and each word with multiple word choices. I also have some of it spun with different phrases or sentences – the number of article combos was like eight hundred million combos.
Somedays, no additional pages indexed, then 20 or so a few days later. At this rate it will take 2 years.
Thanks for your help,
Nick
Nick,
ok – well at least you have the sitemap set up correctly.
However, just because you have your sitemap set-up does not mean Google will index them.
Next step is internal linking. Do you have links from one blog post to another?
And social bookmarking. Have you submitted some of the posts to Facebook, Twitter, G+?
Andrew
Great info in this post! I agree that quality baclinks together with quality content posted in regular basis gets you content ranked!
Did not know about the MaxBlog Ping Optimizer plugin…will definitely check it out.
Marika
Great – I hope the MaxBlog Ping Optimizer plugin helps.
Andrew
I think Google has its fix rate for crawling the blogspot.com blogs and bloggers might not change it until they add their own domain to the blog. Apart from this being regular and posting quality content might increase bloggers SERPs.
RajEnder,
I use blogger to host my site, it started off as a blog but then I bought a custom domain and added pages. I have never heard about a fixed rate of crawling on blogspot.com blogs? If this is true should I be fine since I changed the the domain to my custom one?
Very informative post, I will definitively try out some of the ideas in this post.
Hi Andrew,
I need a serious help here.
For the past 45 days now or there about, my traffic is nothing to write home about and it went down to 0%. But under blocked url from my Google webmasters tools I found these:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
and my domain is having com/robots.txt at the end.
I can’t really explain how I got My site blocked with robot.txt file.
Please, How do I remove the file and unblock my site so that google can index my site.
I am tired of the problem.
Thanks.
Azubuike
I think you are saying your robots.txt file has the following:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
If it only has that, then your site is NOT being blocked.
Andrew
Hi Andrew,
You may be right, but from all I can tell, I strongly believe that my site is been blocked by robot.txt file.
Before I started seeing the following files:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
in my webmasters tools account, I do get thousands of visitors from google search result even after the latest penguim updates.
Then at a time, around last week of May, my site had some tech problems, then I reset almost everything and after that I noticed a total drop from google search engine to the extend that I hardly get 10 visitors daily from google search.
I have tried to see if my site was blacklisted, but NOThing like that, NO malware, in fact I had NO problems with google except that my site contents doesn’t come up in google search result.
Sometimes when I key the exact post title of my blog posts into search bar, I will be seeing results from my facebook fan page, twitter page, social networks where I submitted the article, instead of my site url.
Please I need a solution on how to remove those robot.txt disallow files.
Thanks
Try the robots meta plugin by Yoast.
Andrew
Makes sure not to compromise on quality. The more you put effort in bringing quality content, higher are the chances that your posts/site get links from bloggers alike. So, when you get quality and relevant backlinks, you get higher chance of ranking in search engines.
I agree with that part about 10 good posts over 20 bad ones. Thanks!
I’m using all in seo webmaster and the google more index my articles quickly.