Indexing Web Pages and Discovery of Webpages
Indexing Web Pages & Discovery
I wrote a comment to Ann at SearchEngineJournal.com about her article on ensuring Google is indexing pages of your site found at the link below
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/how-to-get-google-to-index-your-site-deeper/7566/#comment-1084520
Ann seems to think there is a scientific method to having pages indexed. This is fine but SEO is not really a rocket science form of advertising online.
When I wrote one needs only to submit a valid xml sitemap to the search engines various Webmaster offerings to have your site or blogs pages indexed, Ann replied that a sitemap only helps with discovery, and not indexing.
I would like to explain to Ann and others that may be reading, that discovery and indexing go hand in hand with one another, as they are part & parcel.
In order to index a sites pages, those pages must be discovered. Once discovered, the pages would then be indexed. Pages that are discovered and not indexed are typically due to html errors, otherwise once discovered the page would be indexed. In fact it may be indexed many times especially if the content is changed and the sitemap has the proper settings to ensure continual crawling.
However pages cannot be indexed that are not discovered. If the page is not discovered, then there would be no way possible to have it indexed within the constraints of logic.
Hence it is best to submit a valid xml sitemap. Build a sitemap for your users as well, and then send high PR one way links from other relevant sites to your visitor sitemap page, and pass PR to your internals.







