I use Google Alerts as one of the ways to keep track of when and where my content, on my blogs or elsewhere, gets indexed, or otherwise shows up around the web. For example, I have alerts for both makemoneywritingonline.com and “make money writing online.” The idea is that whenever something I write here gets indexed, it should send me an alert. It doesn’t always.
I have my alerts set for “all” instead of best and for “when it happens”. If you have very busy websites that generate a lot of links and feedback and people talking about you, this is not the way to go. But, for a smaller website like this one, these specific alerts generally only trigger when:
- Something I posted gets indexed
- Something I posted gets linked with the name of the website
- Something I posted get scraped or stolen
- Something I linked gets indexed
This brings me to today’s point.
It turns out that as far as regular, no tricks, no effort, indexing goes, the fastest Google index spider that triggers my alerts is the one that indexes Digg.com.
For example, I posted an article on my freelance writing blog not too long ago. I post every-other-day-ish over there, so it is no surprise that Google doesn’t crawl my site every hour. Some days, it takes 36 hours or more to get a new post indexed. It’s not a “news” site, so that doesn’t really bother me.
When I post, I do the usual. I ping the proper servers, my feed goes out, and I bookmark, Like, and Digg my article. Less than an hour later, almost every time, the Digg of my article triggers a Google alert, which means that the webpage corresponding to that Digg, has been indexed and my information found. At that point, if I search, I can find the Digg in the index.
Interestingly, it seems, in my case at least, that while Google does index Digg in near real-time, the spider does not follow those links. In other words, even though the Digg for my latest article shows up right away, the spider doesn’t follow the link and index my page. Instead, my page gets indexed when the Googlebot rolls by of its own accord, or by following a different link.
So, if you want to get something indexed about your post right away, Digg it. It won’t help you get the actual post indexed, but if someone clicks on the Digg result, they’ll be just one click away from getting to your website.