Serendipity Forums

I am a farmer with a web site and a Blog powered by Serendipity.
My current challenge is. How do I get Google to find my Blog ?

Last question, whats the best way to back up my Blog? I post images and text every day so currently have almost 500 images up there.

Any advice or guidance much appreciated.

Adrian

The easiest way to get your site indexed by Google is to get another site that is already listed in the Google index to link to your site. Alternatively, sign up for adwords, and watch the Googlebot index your site.

However, just being indexed won't necessarily increase your traffic or pagerank, you will still need to work on content and building your site community.

Thanks Carl, my main site gets quite good rankings for all the reasons you suggest. But Google doesn't appear to find/read the Blog.

Which is an item in my main navigation and in my site map.

So if I set up a Google Alert (which now includes Blog content) my Blog doesn't feature in the Google Alerts that I receive, despite having highly relevant content for the alert topic.

Or if I search Google Images it doesn't pull up any of the many hundreds of images in my Blog.

So I was wondering if this is something to do with Serendipity hence posting to this site....

Adrian

Hi

I'm just wondering - have you got mod rewite (pretty urls) enabled in your config? Googlebots tend not to like standard Serendipity urls.

Dave

Hi there, my own site users mod-rewrite and Google has no problem with the alerts, in fact I subscribe to my own comments feed from the Google homepage so Serendipity is definitely capable of being used in this way.

I would investigate Dave's query, this might very well be the case, the next option would be to find out if your site is sandboxed or blacklisted. If you've been trying to get your blog into Google its possible you've triggered a flag where the Googlebot has decided you're attempting to spam their database, and they do take this sort of thing quite seriously, they're almost paranoid to be honest. Could you get back to us with what you've actually done, and how often you've submitted your site. Could you also post the URL to it?

Isn't there a plugin that will make a google-sitemap and tells it everytime you make a new entry?

There is, but as I recall it's been having trouble lately. Something about Google terms of service changes or something.

Äh, trouble? I use this plugin in my private blog - are this troubles for plugin-users?

I believe I was thinking of this thread.

hm, I couldn't see anything about legal term violations there!?

True; there's a different thread where someone tried to reimplement the Google AdSense stuff that brought up the problem with terms of service. The sitemap plugin doesn't have that problem.

There were some other technical problems, but I believe they were all solved in that thread. So far as I'm aware at this point, the Google SiteMap plugin works as expected.

OK, than I am relieved.