Recently (last Friday), we launched our corporate website. We’d had a one pager up for a few months while we worked on content, design and architecture, but we didn’t want to open it to Google for indexing until we had all our proverbial ducks in a row. When we finally allowed robots.txt last Friday, we got to watch first hand as Google indexed our website.
This was a bit of an experiment, so ignoring all the best practices I give to clients, we “launched” without an XML sitemap. I wanted to see what Google would find most interesting and be most inclined to index first. By the way, there are 0 internal links to any of the interior pages and approximately 80 to the home page.
First, the homepage. They indexed that right away and updated the content in the description from the “a description for this page is not available…” to our actual description.
Second, the primary services pages: PPC, SEO, and Web Design. But not any of the sub-pages under those service pages.
Third, and this was perhaps the most interesting… blog pages. But not the blog home page, only the 2 original articles I wrote. I have to believe this is because I am active on Google+ and have authorship markup enabled. And it was only the 2 originals… I have excerpts from all the articles I’ve written for Search Engine Land on there too.
The other interesting thing about that is that we have authorship enabled for my colleague as well. But her articles didn’t get indexed first (sorry Diane). I believe this is because she’s not as active on Google Plus as I am, and therefore doesn’t have the same level of authorship authority built up.
So today I messed it all up by finally submitting the sitemap, but it will still be interesting to see how the rest of the indexing process goes.