There are some amazing lists of all the activities we should carry out in order to grab Google’s attention. And some of it is indeed useful and worth taking note of, but there is plenty that really is not necessary.
Having recently been referred to a blog recommending that we add a “mega” ping list to WordPress, that then goes on to suggest a plugin to manage the pings (OK – for those that don’t know what a ping is, it sends an update to your “ping list” when you publish or edit a blog post – it basically tells that list of updates), I wondered just how long it takes for fresh content to be picked up with a basic set-up.
Well I keep forgetting to check within minutes of a blog post going out so will add a comment to this one as soon as published. But one post from earlier today was showing on Google within 10 minutes of it being published. So my inclination is not to fuss overly about such things. OK so it’s not really a lot of work to put these other things in place, but I’m not convinced that the virtual equivalent of jumping up and down to tell the world that your blog post is there is really what will attract the most positive attention in the long term. It’s not necessary and adds noise, is what I think. And the search engines don’t like being shouted at. So I’ll stick with my simple one ping and the plugins that work with the Google Webmaster tools and have our fresh content picked up within what I consider a more than reasonable amount of time – spoken as one who can remember well that it could take months for content and new websites to be noticed by Google – not that many years ago!
Now I can understand the desire to add any helpful tools to our armoury – it’s not that long ago that it would take months for Google to pick up a new website. But we do need to keep on top of what is happening anyway, put sensible processes in place that don’t
