Blogify Your Static Website for Google
*The guest tip was provided by Matthew Yarro, JuiceeLinks*
Not every website on the Internet is a blog. I know, It seems crazy in today’s super-social-media climate, but some websites simply exist to offer up whatever information they deem to be important–and do so with infrequent updates.
The problem with these “static” websites is that Google eventually realizes that the websites are not being frequently updated, and so it makes a point of not crawling these websites as often as it would blogs that are updated regularly. This can result in a huge time lag between the time content is added to a webpage and a Googlebot returns to the website to re-crawl it–or crawl it for the first time.
Keep Your Website Indexed and Up to Date with Google Reader
How can you increase the frequency of a crawl for relatively static content? By using the Google Reader.
The Google reader, which has been traditionally used to aggregate feeds from blogs and other sources, now allows you to create a feed for a static webpage:
Feeds make it easy to follow updates to all kinds of webpages, from blogs to news sites to Craigslist queries, but unfortunately not all pages on the web have feeds. Today we’re [Google] rolling out a change in Google Reader that lets you create a custom feed to track changes on pages that don’t have their own feed.
These custom feeds are most useful if you want to be alerted whenever a specific page has been updated… (Google.com)
Use Google Reader to Crawl My Website, Huh?
What does this all mean? Follow me for a moment. In order for the Google Reader to post changes to an otherwise static webpage, Google has to crawl that page and crawl it frequently. After all, there is no value in claiming that the Google Reader can watch a static page and alert you of any changes, if that alert comes seven days after the fact.
I believe that once you have targeted a webpage with the Google Reader, Google is crawling your content at least once every twenty-four hours. And that is precisely what the examples from the announcement on the Google Reader blog suggest.
If you check the examples, the minimum frequency between updates is twenty-four hours, and it could even be less. The Google Reader seems to aggregate the changes into a twenty-four hour period. So it is possible, that the reader is checking more than once in a twenty-four hour period.
And what’s more, if Google is going to crawl the page to see if the content has changed, then Google has your page indexed in one of its databases.
Get Your Google Reader in Gear
If you have static webpages or entirely new content that you need crawled, target your webpages with the Google Reader. Using the Google Reader allows Google to quickly find, crawl and index your content.
36 Responses to “Blogify Your Static Website for Google”
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Get your static pages crawled – http://dailyseotip.com/blogify-your-static-website-for-google/524/
Blogify Your Static Website for Google | Daily SEO Tip http://tinyurl.com/ykcyjd7 #SEOM
How & why to get Google Reader to make a feed from your static site: http://dailyseotip.com/blogify-your-static-website-for-google/524/
Blogify Your Static Website for Google http://bit.ly/daQXJz Very smart tip from Anne Smarty
Great suggestion!
Perfect. I have lamented for a long time that there was no easy way to encourage Google to come and visit our main site.
Thank you for this clear and useful explanation.
I just followed the instructions and it took all of five seconds to set up.
Thank you!
Thank you! That was a wonderful tip!
Good suggestion.
But I think we are yet to see if that would affect the indexing in the search engine database.
Great post.Thank you for such a valuable info.
Interesting – I had not realized setting this up would guarantee Google scanning your page but now that I think about it makes sense. I will be setting up my reader momentarily.
Interesting tip – I’m with a few others on the comments here that the Google feed fetcher may not be a mainline in to the organic index.
Extremely easy to test though, and I don’t doubt the tip source has some tangible evidence to support the idea.
I’ve switched over all my sites to WordPress self hosted blogs. My stats say that Google is visiting my sites more often now.
You make some great points in this post, but in order to put a feed to use you have to actually update content, something that most static website owners don’t do. I’m not sure adding a feed to the static site is going to do much unless you are constantly updating your site. In some cases on a static site you can use a program like CARP to aggregate feeds and display the contents as html text on your pages…. I have used this for some static sites, where new feeds from industry related blogs/sites get spit out onto their pages on a regular basis, telling the Google spiders that there is fresh content to index. These sites seem to get crawled and indexed much more frequently.
I agree blog the best way to keep update your website on daily basis and also helpful for crawling your website in google via google reader.
From http://www.google.com/feedfetcher.html:
Feedfetcher: Google’s Feed Grabber
Feedfetcher is how Google grabs RSS or Atom feeds when users choose to add them to their Google homepage or Google Reader. Feedfetcher collects and periodically refreshes these user-initiated feeds, but does not index them in Blog Search or Google’s other search services (feeds only appear in our search results if they’ve been crawled by Googlebot).
This is a great tip. I was unaware of the fact that you can add static sites to Google Reader. Are you suggesting adding our own sites to Reader to get the ball rolling?
Thanks!
I hate to disagree, but I have side with Theo Peek that there seems to be zero overlap between the feed-reading function and googlebot. Examining the actual server logs – you can see both bots hitting my site (I have both a blog site and a static site so it was easy to test) but with very little overlap. Is it just me, or is there confusion between the monolithic “GOOGLE” and the various Google bots and applications?
It would seem to me that Google’s Webmaster tools provides the definitive entry point to understanding how Googlebot is seeing your site.
I think Joost, like anyone, has to disclose when they are paid for a review. This, obviously, doesn’t mean that they do but I’m guessing Joost would have anyway
It’s an interesting idea, but, as some suggest, it may not work now (the Google Reader may be independent of the Googlebot), or, if it does work, people will spam this trick to the point where Google will make it stop working shortly.
The difficult truth is that that if you want good Search Results, a good site, and conversions, you should probably actually work on the site on a regular basis. If nothing else, edit your pages occasionally. I’ve got pages on website that I’ve edited 5 or 6 times, and I’m now able to communicate the same concepts in about half the words. In addition to engaging human visitors better, these pages are more keyword dense, and they’ve been changed.
Putting real, relevant new information on the site will impress and engage your visitors. Even automated methods of posting new content will give at site the “feel” of providing current information.
Thank you.I never thought of it that way.Getting my static web site pages indexed has been a problem.My blog posts are updated on Google reader but I never added my static web site pages.
that wonderfull…
This is a really great tip that I hadn’t considered! Thanks for sharing!
great article. .
Great tips! Keep the amazing articles coming!
Update is important for blog….
why Goolge not crawling my website frequently . it did not cache my page since 20 days. how can i increase crawling
The key benefit of outsourcing is that it makes you free from any sort of tension
This is a very insightful post and makes sense once you take the time to think about it. I especially think this tip is helpful when your site is just starting out as well..
We doing an experiment with a static front page vs. a blog for an advertising site we’re building. I’m not sure Google Reader will help us,but it’s worth a try,thanks.
Great suggestion! rushopn.com
II also want to get my static website in google reader but how you didn’t get us. Please update this artical and tell us how we can do that.
Thanks for such a nice post
What a brilliant way of using the Google reader in order to get the big G to crawl your static site more often. I’ll try it out soon.
great point about google reader. It is definitely an underused tool that can be a great resource for sharing info, links and present some great link building ops.
Thanks for the sharing a wonderful tips. Its true that Google reader is very sophisticated way from which Google quickly find, crawl and index your content.
Nice Article i had this problem you stated with one of my clients static website . very Informative it will definitely a good tip.