Ever publish a wonderful new piece of content and then a day later you search Google and your masterpiece is nowhere to be found? There are ways you can nudge Google and get them to send their bots to your article for crawling.
The video below from Moz.com shows a lot of tips on how to ensure your content gets properly added to the search engines.
The tip that most interested me was a method of submitting a new article individually using a web browser. The format is below:
http://www.google.com/ping?sitemap=[url]
“[URL]” means your new content’s URL or web address replaces [url]. So if I wanted to submit my shining new story to Google and the web address was:
https://reallyfreeseotools.com/getting-new-content-submitted-to-google
I would enter the below web address into my web browser:
http://www.google.com/ping?sitemap=https://reallyfreeseotools.com/getting-new-content-submitted-to-google
If you do this correctly you should get a browser message like I did (below):
Sitemap Notification Received
Your Sitemap has been successfully added to our list of Sitemaps to crawl. If this is the first time you are notifying Google about this Sitemap, please add it via http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ so you can track its status. Please note that we do not add all submitted URLs to our index, and we cannot make any predictions or guarantees about when or if they will appear.
I think this is a very useful tool. After I submit an article there are several things I usually do to get traffic to that article. Most of these things involve social media. Now I’ll add this procedure to my list of things to do after I post new content.
In the video below Cyrus Shepard from over at Moz.com gives a pretty in-depth explanation of several other methods for making sure that your content is indexed by Google.
