Newbie question. Just went live on my site and added a google sitemap. The site has 70 url's but only two were indexed. Is this normal? Is there a ratio you should shoot for? What makes the spiders go fo some pages and not others?

Thanks
JimC

Be patient!

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PageRank.

Hi Jim C;

Wanted to give you an expanded answer to help you out a bit.

When your site first goes up, it takes a bit for the search engines to get out to all of your pages. If you have 70 pages...your goal would be to have them ALL indexed, unless you told the search engines not to index some of them (not likely in your case).

So the ratio should be 100%, ideally.

Now as to what makes spiders go for some and not others...

Well...sometimes it is time (since yours is brand new)...since you put up your sitemap, that should help. And you can often help things along by adding links to some of the internal pages (from other sites) to let Google (or other search engines) know that they are there and that they are important.

The important thing is to relax and build. One day at a time. One link at a time . You will in fact get there.

Hope that helps

Best;

Eric

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Eric Blackwell
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Site age has nothing to do with crawl depth/frequency. A new site has very few backlinks - in that sense, yes, it matters. But waiting for a year without building new links won't change anything.

Sitemap XML will help Google discover new pages, but without link juice, just because pages get discovered doesn't mean they get indexed.

That's basically it. Install an HTML sitemap and build backlinks.

I want to thanks everyone for your feed back.

This leads me to another question about link backing. Some other Seo company got my name and they are talking about writing articles to get links. This seems to be a trend or method in the seo world. When I question them about the articles they seemed very general and vague about the articles.

If I hire someone to do this, shouldn't the articles be written around the pages and keyword phrases I'm trying to target.

Thanks

JimC

That depends - are they writing articles "for" your site if so then yes they should be on topic and relevant to your site - but they should not be writing "articles" as much as they should be writing amazing unique content for your site.

If they are writing articles for distribution (Like we at REW Do) they should actually be generic in a sense (Although on topic with real estate related issues)

The reason for the generic portion, is these articles are created for syndication - we are trying to get other Realtors who don't have a writing budget, cannot write well or are to lazy - to find this content (Due to where we syndicate) and publish it to their own site as content with the signature which has a backlink credit in tact - this helps generate lots of one way links and is a very effective strategy if done correctly.

The more universally a topic applies the more likely it will get picked up and re-used with your link in tact - for instance, if you write about something specific to Bellingham Washington, you have limited your audience because only those in bellingham would logically place it - but if you write a great article helping real estate customers (Which have common needs in all regions) on lets say "preparing your home to sell for top dollar" (And it's a great article) then why wouldn't a Realtor in Calgary, or Los Angeles or anywhere else want to place it on their site, as it is helpful to their readers and makes them look good

Hope that helps

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I get at least five SEO sales calls a week from people who know less than I do, where do they find my contact info? Probably the first page of google...

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