Enslave and Control Search Engines to your wishes

Find out answers to some of the most pressing questions in the mind of all webmasters, like How do you know if your site has just been crawled? or What do you do to keep your site regularly crawled or How to force search engines to crawl your website more often?

Imagine a situation where you do not need to fret in the morning worrying about how your articles fared among the visitors, the search engines treat your website with respect and honor. Wonder how it would feel like. Now imagine another aggressive situation where all the search engines are in your pocket and because of it, the visitors worship your website.

The only way this is going to happen is when your learn how the search engines function. For example, when you know how your car functions, you can always modify it to run faster. SO when you understand how the search engines function you can always modify your site to function better and give better returns.

How do you know if your site has just been crawled? 

There are certain indications to remind you that your site has just been crawled. But the most definitive indication is a sharp increase in the visitor statistics as shown in the graph(from an actual blog). Though your case might not be as aggressive as given here, but you get the point. You must find out this particular peak in your case and find out the frequency. Now time your articles accordingly to get maximum viewership. To change the frequency of crawling, you must have to change the frequency of posting on your blog or the frequency of updation of your website. A previous article explains pretty clearly how you can create a perfect schedule for your blog posts and in a week and also when should you post/update in a day to get the maximum visitors.

What do you do to keep your site crawled regularly? 

The only answer to this question is by updating your website regularly. Post more frequently and you’ll get your site crawled frequently. But you must remember, as omnipresent and omnipotent Google appears to be, Not all pages appear in a Google search results. To phrase it properly, not all pages are indexed in Google’s records. The reasons vary much but you can appeal against Google’s decision by submitting it manually through your Google webmaster account. The only limitation is that you can submit only 500 links through your webmaster account. The above was to have your webpage crawled, but what should you do to save your webpage from being crawled? The answer is a robots.txt file. Since the Google-bots are automated, a robots.txt file is checked first before a bot enters the site for the crawling process. So through a directive in your file you can prevent the Google-bots from entering in the particular webpage thus avoiding any crawl process. 

How to force Google to crawl your website more frequently?

• One of the ways is with the use of internal and external links. Those are also to be used in two different methods, by harboring links or by hosted links on external websites. Internal links on your websites will provide incentives to search engines to crawl the website more frequently so as to index more links. However for the case of frequency of crawling, more preferable than internal links are external links. Google values external links because it considers it (External links) as a source of new links increasing the overall directory strength of the web giant. It also considers external links as another method of value addition to the hyperlinks.
• Another higher priority method is by hosting your link on some other website. When a link of your website is found on another website Google values it as a recommendation for your website to be crawled further. Your link status can be very well found out using your Google websmaster tools. Some web experts claim that your website server must also be fast. For those of you who have hosted their own website on your own hardware, it is better to upgrade and render your site fast enough.
• Another method is sitemaps, A Site-Map is basically a way of telling the search engines how you want your website to be crawled. Personally, I’ve had some bitter experiences with site maps and my views are shared with several others. I would not recommend using site-maps even though it can be called as a possible solution to the web crawl scenario.

Last but not the least, the only sure-shot way of ensuring frequent visits by Google is by frequent updation of your content.

This was a Mumbo-Jumbo about,