I blog on *****.wordpress.com a wordpress hosted blog. I have about 75 posts and probably has atmost 1 backlink. However surprisingly, i notice the following. 1) PR has steadly rised to 4 with most of the internal pages at PR 3. 2) Almost all blog posts i author appears on google search page immediately and ranks at spot 1 or 2 on page one. I don't know, if iam doing right things unknowingly, so i want to know the answers why iam seeing good results as noted above? Becuase of the above observations, i started posting on breaking news watching TV and newspapers as soon as i see them. I carefully use good tags that people will most likely use in search. I get 50-100 hits withn 2 hours of my post and the rate of hits drops as the buzz for the news drops.
Wordpress has a built in Ping Feature. It pings major search engines to come and crawl your post. That's why your posts get indexed quickly with WordPress.
I use Wordpress for my blog as well. The default Wordpress installation pings pingomatic which pings quite a few services (including Google). Google index pages pretty much immediately, sometimes it takes 5-10 minutes as well. But if you're a regular poster, you're in the results right away.
Awesome. So, pingomatic is the reason. What does pingomatic do? Does it submits sitemap.xml file? Does wordpress maintains sitemap.xml for each and every blog and pings the google every few minutes? I thought that google doesn't allow repeated pings (atleast 1 hour between 2 pings). Is that right?
It doesn't submit a sitemap file. It just submits your RSS feed which if you're using Wordpress is located here: http://yoursite.com/feed/ Google doesn't allow repeated pings if the content hasn't changed. However if you've changed content (made a new post), it will allow you to ping. I've posted a post, it's pinged automatically. I've posted another a few minutes later and it still pinged and indexed immediately. If you want to submit your sitemap, use Google Webmaster tools: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
It submits data by pinging them with the sitemap.xml file and the feed data. And they allow pings anytime. It's like the Google Webmasters feature. Edit: WOW, same time as guy above
Thank you guys, iamlearning something new. why use sitemap.xml, if i can use ping service which uses rss feed? I am asking this because, i have another self hosted blog on my own domain. thanks
A sitemap is more of a directory of your site (where everything is). An RSS feed is more like a directory of just your content (your blog posts), an RSS feed doesn't send information like newly created pages you may have, only blog posts. Hope that helped.
You still need to use sitemap.xml because Google spiders would need to find your your older posts and blog pages to index it, especially if they are buried deep after several months. The ping feature would work only for your newer posts but will become stale after awhile.
Yup the wordpress.com - hosted Blogs are an awesome alternative for free / non profit bloggers. But if you want to capitalize on the traffic then you're in trouble, I was creating a new blog every week, I would get up to 7000 visits a day (to the blog) - then boom - my blog was deleted. You just can't put ad's on the blog or links to your own sites (or too many). But the reason for the posts to get indexed so fast is not only due to tag and ping - it's wordpress.com's presence and the respect that Google has for wordpress - then add several tags to your blog, the tags in turn have their own pages (of course) and these have PR - and bots crawling them regularly. One post with the maximum 12 tags/categories automatically means 12 links back to your post. If you have a look within your stats and where traffic is coming from - I bet most of the traffic comes from the tags.
personally, sitemaps are more effective for me Sitemaps are more reliable as they can act like archives
Can't really compare the two .... site maps and pings are two different services and both have different functions and strengths.
Exactly. Pings are simply sending your latest blog posts to whoever wants to index them. Sitemaps are good for archiving your content (ie. older blog posts). Sitemaps just tell search engine spiders where they can go, and what pages you have that may not be explicitly linked too. Sitemaps are handy for hidden pages you want search engines to see.
well thats the affect of wordpress hosted blog !! even many times you get backlink from PR8 Wordpress.com so there is easy way to get Pr3+ easily.
Google loves the wordpress platform more than its own blogger and that's the reason for its faster indexing
Google aren't that anti-competitive. There are other blogging platforms that index just as fast as Wordpress. It isn't a Wordpress only thing.
thank you guys for all your responses. Here is my view of blogging platforms. Wordpress is best but doesn't allow javascript (sp no adsense and yahoo ads) Blogspot is best to (little less than wordpress) but allows adsense. Somehow, i feel that my blog's popularity is because of wordpress. Also, going forward wordpress is adding social networking fetures (buddypress). This should propell wordpress on to the same platform where myspace, facebook exist.