What did I learn today ?

You may recall I’ve mentioned my surprise when a new .com domain name that I had purchased and put up a coming soon page was indexed by google in what I considered to be record time.

The new site had absolutely no incoming links, I hadn’t added it to my webmaster tools account or done anything at all for Google to know that the domain existed which got my brain wondering what was Google up too.

But I’ve since learn’t that Google is actually now a domain registrar and therefore knows when any new top level (.com .net etc) is registered. So when a new domain name is registered it actually seeks out this new domain for indexing. It only does this for top level domains not second level domains such as .com.au or .co.uk.

Interesting huhhh

So how does this affect our site SEO strategies?? Please leave your idea as comments.

Crawling and Indexing

The Google dance is the updating of the servers which hold Google’s search results. The updating of the results used to sometimes be quite dramatic hence the dance terminology. These days the “Google index updates” are a lot more continuous and subtle but it is still an important concept to be aware of.

Before your web pages can be affected by the “Google index updates” your website needs to be crawled and index by Google “spiders”. Which considering the huge number of web pages on the internet and the number being added everyday gives you an idea why it can take awhile to get into Google results or index.

The spiders called Googlebots are crawling programs, which follow links to fetch documents. This is the first step in a webpage being added to the Google index. These spiders are pieces of software which are on over 10,000 servers. And from these 10,000+ servers Google gets it search results.

Google Dance and Datacenters

Not only Google’s index is spread over more than 10,000 servers, but these servers are, in 12 different data centers.

Datacenters and different Google results

Often when you do a Google search you get back different results why? Because of the datacenters having different indexes!! When you conduct a search through you may get the results from one datacenter and then another time from another datacenter. Which datacenter returns your results can depend on your ip address, browser etc and the of course the Google dance.

The Google Dance Test Domains www2 & www3

The beginning of a Google Dance can always be watched at the test domains www2.google.com and www3.google.com. The reason for having www2 and www3 is rather to show the new index to webmasters which are interested in their upcoming rankings. Many of these webmasters discuss the new index at the Google forums out on the web. These discussions can be observed by Google employees.

More information of how Google collects and ranks results can be found here. It old but still relevant http://www.google.com/librariancenter/articles/0512_01.html

And below you can check what’s going on in the Google dance

http://www.seochat.com/googledance/

So you’ve finally found your page in Google after desperately trying for days, weeks even to get- you’ve checked every day and tried new things every day then viola your in. The instant response is to think that the last change you made was the magic wand that pressed Googles button.

But becareful -when did Google last indexed your page- probably a while before yesterdays change.

how do you know when Google last looked at your page- you find your page in Google then click “cached” below your link to see what Google’s cached version of your page which may be quite different to what you think Google saw and also on this page you can see the date and time Google last looked at your page. One other thing remember Google isn’t or running on Australian time so you may need to factor in the time difference as well.