Credit: Walter Wycliffe
With crawl rate being an uber factor in deciding how fast webpages are indexed in the SERPs, SEO’s are always striving for ways to invite the Googlebot over to client websites more frequently. Of course, generating new and quality content is probably the best way to inject some fresh visits from the googlebot, but then again, generating new content is quite the task in itself. But are there other legitimate ways to having a website crawled more frequently than simply generating new content? I’m going to show you atleast 5 ways to easily get the Googlebot coming for more!
- Think Dynamic - Dynamic content is probably the best ‘passive’ way to attract bots to frequently visit a website or webpage. For example, using plugins that dynamically change the content on your Wordpress blog would be one such example. Any plugins built to show randomized posts, frequently changing popular posts, recent comments, and other such frequently changing elements would fall into this category.
- Go Social - Do you have a social media website related to your website’s niche that you visit on a regular basis? Why not add a widget if they offer it to your website? The less javascript in the widget the better, as the bots will see on page content rendered in html better than JS calls.
- Add Some Pictures - Do you have a corporate photo album on Flickr? Why not add a small photo stream to your website to keep things down to earth. Aside from crawling benefits, it’ll show your prospective customers that your business values its employees, and that you can have some fun!
- Ping Everywhere you Can - Holler at ‘em when you’re ready to push the publish button on that post. Letting most major pinging services know that you have a new entry is often enough to tip the bots over to your site. I prefer using Wordpress’s built-in pinging service with close to a 100 pinging urls. Leave a comment and I’ll pass you my huge list of pinging urls.
- Random Quote of the Day - Whats better than tying well known quotes to your business’s core values? A simple RSS importer can be used to populate random quotes of the day based on a certain keyword. Have an advertising agency website? Get quotes from the great Leo Burnett or Ogilvy. It’ll not only make you look sophisticated to your audience, but to the googlebot too!
Do you have more out-of-the-box ideas to make the googlebot a frequent visitor? Leave a comment and let me know your thoughts.
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23 Responses to “5 Unique Ways to Make the Google Bot Your Best Friend”
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February 19th, 2008 at 8:17 am
Great post, Dev. I love your ideas to send the Google-Bot to a Blog more often.
Would you forward to me the pinging URL’s you use? I don’t think I have nearly 100 of them and I must be missing a few.
Thanks, Dev.
February 19th, 2008 at 8:52 am
Hey Shana - Thanks!! You’ve got mail and a great ping list waiting in your inbox
February 19th, 2008 at 9:56 am
The FlickR tip I really like, off to upload some photo’s as we speak - Thank you.
February 19th, 2008 at 10:32 am
Hey Dev. The offer of those pinging URL’s is too good a chance to pass up. Would you be so kind sir?
Great post BTW.
Cheers
February 19th, 2008 at 11:38 am
Your’re very welcome kind commentators! If you wish to have the ping list, kindly send me a mail to dev [at] searchenginepeople [dot] com and I’ll gladly send you the excel file with all the entries. — Dev
February 19th, 2008 at 11:38 am
Btw, if you liked this article, I’d appreciate it if you could share it with anyone who would find it valuable by stumbling it or sphinning the post!
February 19th, 2008 at 5:48 pm
Dev, Loved this article. Please send me the list of 100 ping urls. I greatly appreciate it.
February 20th, 2008 at 4:08 am
6. Submit your posts to news media websites..
February 20th, 2008 at 9:57 am
Great ideas. Please send the list. Thanks.
February 21st, 2008 at 12:38 am
Great ideas for the benefits of widgets and random quotes. I’d never looked at either as a way to attract bots.
Happy to have your ping list as well. Thanks.
February 21st, 2008 at 3:05 am
Hi Dev.
Nice little “Keep it simple” post, that can help alot of people. I’ve got at quick question - How shall i name my photos, to ensure Googlebot index those correct?
And would also very much appreciate the ping-list as well.
TY.
Søren J ;o)
February 21st, 2008 at 4:36 am
Really nice and informative article many decent ideas, thanks for sharing. I Sphinned you on the link on their site that I found you at. I would love to see your pinging list if you don’t mind sending it to me. This is a strategy I use often to bold back links to our blogs. Works very well and virtually no effort required.
February 21st, 2008 at 5:15 am
well
i have think to use from feed burner by taking last posts &insert them in other blog i own so when bot enter one blog he also saw the other blog last posts&vis versa
i found it help if you work one one of them daily &th other weekly
both updated content i think this will be a great tactic if many webmasters united & do this
check this
http://smalbusinessidea.com/blog
http://easyfreefrorex.blogspot.com/
http://asmalbusinessidea.blogspot.com/
this is 3 blogs
check them you will see in 2 @3
i put the latest posts code in th other blog
&put 1 latest posts in the 2&3 by this way if i work in 2 the 3 updated hope this help
February 21st, 2008 at 6:18 am
Great article. Thanks.. Looking forward to the ping list
February 21st, 2008 at 6:42 am
Cool ideas. I didn’t know wp had a built-in pinging service. I just relied on Feedburner. Do you think googlebot recognizes Google reader js?
February 21st, 2008 at 9:57 am
Hey Dev,
Great list to get indexed. I’d like to take a look at that ping list as well.
February 21st, 2008 at 10:17 am
Hey There,
Thanks for this great post! Appreciated, and great ideas! See, often I can guess most of what might be said on these top 5 top 10 links, but this one, none of the info even crossed my mind.
Thanks a mill! And if you don’t mind, I would love the list of pinging urls.
Thanks!
February 21st, 2008 at 4:30 pm
Cool, that’s a nice list of “passive” ways to attract Google bots. You can always quantify the crawl rate using SEO Meter to see if these methods really work.
February 22nd, 2008 at 1:13 am
Ratings, charts, things that can be updated on a regular basis — say top 5 TV shows for the week — can work very well without requiring tons of writing and thought.
Yes, please send the ping list!
February 26th, 2008 at 11:17 pm
Great article here, can you send me that list of ping sites? Thank you so much