With a self-hosted Wordpress blog, if you set your home page to have say 3 posts, when you make a new post is it normal for a new post to be indexed initially both on the home page and also indexed simultaneously as a permalink and both to show up in google hopefully at same time? Or does the home page get indexed initially and later also the permalink?
That depends on whether you have any restrictions set up in your robots.txt so that whether the crawler/bots will index/follow your home page or the other post/page i believe.
Chec kyour robots.txt file, and then the bots will follow your homepage to other pages, i think anyway
I have seen strange activity from google on this count. You would think that they would crawl the index page first and then crawl the internal pages. But my observations of their activity - by checking the archived copy of pages in their index - is much different. I noted on several occasions that while they are working with an archive of the index that is weeks old, the internal pages of the blog get crawled usually within 24-48 hours of posting. I had been annoyed at the fact that they were not regularly pulling the index page, because I wanted my internal pages crawled. It worked out that they are crawling the internal pages when I want them to do so, but I am still somewhat confused that they don't pick up the index page as frequently as I believe that they would.
Does the robots.txt file have to have something specific in it so that both the index as well as individual posts as permalinks get crawled? Don't understand the robots.txt too well. Thanks