Nov 07
MashingWindows.com has made its appearance on Yahoo
and the number of pages indexed by Google is escalated to 6
while the new Alexa Rank is now 1,229,116.
Nov 04
Oct 31
Alexa Rank for Mashing Windows today is: 2,315,268; not bad for a blog built on a domain name that did not exist 5 days ago.
Oct 30
All Hosting services give you some type of web stats, Hostgator gives me AWstats and Webalizer. That and Google Analytics will give you too much information, contributing to your information overload.
I check Google Analytics every day, and once in a while I will also check the AWstats, especially on a new site to verify that it is indexed by the search engines.
Looking at the stats for Mashing Windows, it seems that Google and Yahoo have found it, by MSN is missing in action.
The good news is that Alexa, the Web Archive and Ask have found this blog, along with 4 other robots in incognito.
Oct 30
Aaron suggested that I use Yahoo’s Site Explorer and Authenticate the site and the XML feed in order to expedite Yahoo’s indexing of the blog.
Pretty simple procedure:
- Go to siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com;
- Log in with your Yahoo account, otherwise sign up for one (free);
- Enter the url of your site or blog to the box on top of the page, then click on “Add My Site”, and your site will appear in the list below the box;
- Click on the “Authenticate” button;
- This will bring you to a new page, where you’ll have two methods to authenticate your site:
- Uploading an authentication file to your site;
or
- Adding a META tag to your home page. - I opted for the first option, so I downloaded the proper file and uploaded to the site (link);
- Click on “Ready to Authenticate”;
- If you have a plain web site and no blog, you’re DONE!. If your site has feeds, as in a blog, you need to do one more step: click on the “Manage” button;
- On the next screen you’ll enter the feed path of your site or blog, usually “/feed” or “/feed/atom”;
- Click on “Add Feed”;
- DONE!
Oct 30
What a difference one day makes, today Google is playing catch-up and has now indexed 8 pages. Still no sign of life from Yahoo or MSN.
Screenshot obtained using Pearl Crescent Page Saver Firefox extension.
Oct 29
Strange. Google indexed ONE more page, and only one, this one; which is also the most recent post. In the process Google skipped other pages/posts between the first one and this last one.
The mystery continues, further proof that SEO is pure alchemy: part science, part art.
Oct 29
The favicon is the little image that shows on the URL bar, right before the “http://….” . It also shows up on the browser tabs, and in your favorites once you bookmark the site.
It’s just another touchpoint for branding.
- Select the image that you will use for the favicon.
- Go to html-kit.com/favicon.
- Upload your image.
- Download the ZIP file containing the favicon.ico, an animated .gif file of the same icon, and the instructions.
- On a WordPress blog is not as straightforward as on a website, but it is still manageable:
- open up your site manager, I use either Microsoft FrontPage or Microsoft Expression Web;
- open header.php within the folder containing the theme that you are using;
- within <head> and </head>, insert the following lines:
<link rel=”shortcut icon” href=”favicon.ico” />
<link rel=”icon” href=”favicon1.gif” type=”image/gif” />
where favicon.ico and favicon1.gif are the names of the icon files. - Save theheader.php file.
- Upload the favicon.ico and favicon1.gif files to the root directory of your site.
- DONE!
Oct 29
Google has indexed the site, but only one page shows up, could be that Google is lazy or too busy.
You can make Google’s life easier by building a XLM sitemap, practically showing Google what pages to visit on your site. There are many ways to do so. If you have a web site, you can use xml-sitemaps.com to generate the sitemap, then upload, and direct Google to look for it using Google Webmaster Central.
If you have a WordPress blog, there’s an easier way: Arne Brachhold’s Google XML Sitemap Generator for WordPress 3.0 plugin.
- Install the plugin;
- Go to Options\XML-Sitemap;
- The first line should read: “The sitemap wasn’t built yet. Click here to build it the first time.” Click on the link to build the sitemap.
- Done! The plugin has built the sitemap, and has notified Google, Yahoo, and Ask.com. The plugin will also update the sitemap as you update your blog.
What we want is something similar to the following for Google, Yahoo and MSN.
Oct 28
Do you remember the scene from the Matrix, where Trinity tells Neo “The Matrix has you Neo . . .”?
Well, that’s sort of what happens on the web, you don’t have your site or blog into Google, Google has you, or doesn’t.
Today I was talking to a friend regarding this small project, and I Googled it while I was on the phone, and . . . here it is! Searching for mashing windows shows up on the site.
Remember, two short days ago this domain did not exist, let along the blog or any entries.
Google has indexed only one page, let’s see how long before other pages show up in the index.
No sign of Mashing Windows on Yahoo, MSN.
So far only one linkback showing up on Yahoo.