Google is Already Spidering my New SiteLiteracy Weblog)

My digital move from UWEC to Seton Hill is happening much faster than I had anticipated. My UWEC weblog, which changed several times a day, seems to have encouraged Google’s spiders to check out a good chunk of my website on a regular basis. The cache was rarely more than a day behind the pages that updated most frequently, and if I made a minor change to a web page that didn’t change frequently, the change was usually in Google’s system within a few days.

I’ve been working on my Seton Hill website for about two months now; it’s been “live” all that time, but Google didn’t find it because I wasn’t linking to it, and nobody else was, either. Now, just a few days after my farewell post to my UWEC blog, Google has found this one, and has so far indexed about 150 pages on the site. That’s pretty darn efficient.

While my UWEC site had been dormant for about three weeks, I started posting on it again, in order to encourage the bots, spiders, and real human beings to start visiting it on a regular basis again, and thus perhaps have a bigger audience when the move took place.

I posted the announcement on my old weblog, posted to a pair of interactive fiction news groups, pinged weblogs.com, and e-mailed about four webloggers to inform them of the link change. I really haven’t spent much time publicizing the new site, but the response was tremendous.

Now I’d like to watch to see what PageRank does to some pages where my UWEC website was the top hit.

• One of my UWEC pages is the top Google hit for “blurbs,” but my Seton Hill site (which has the same content but no off-site publicity) is nowhere in sight.
• I just changed my
  York Corpus Christi website (another top Google hit) to redirect to the new page, and since Thursday is the day the medieval church would have celebrated the Feast of Corpus Chisti, and this Sunday is the day the modern church will celebrate it, I plan to Google for Catholic and Medieval blogs and send a handful of them a brief note.

• There are already a few links to my new “Literacy Weblog,” and at the moment my Seton Hill site is the eighth listed in a Google search. [Update 30 June: Now the Seton Hill version is second.]
• A Google search for “Dennis G. Jerz” brings my UWEC site up first, but my Seton Hill site up fifth. [Update 30 Jun: Now the Seton Hill site is third, but it’s not my new home page — it’s the index page for my writing subdirectory.]

At the moment, while Google does seem to be paying some attention to category listings (which at the moment aren’t actually filtering things… sorry about that), it hasn’t seem to be searching any of the permalinks.

For the record, in my last month at UWEC, the stylesheet I use on my weblog was getting about 1500 hits per week, but my website as a whole was getting just under 50,000 hits per week. So, as far as the rest of the Internet is concerned, the value of my website far overshadows the value of my weblog, but the bots visit my site far more often than it would be necessary to index an archive of online teaching aids.