Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Google Using ToolBar Data To Find New Sites


Google ToolbarI’ve read a lot recently that Google is relying more and more on ToolBar data for determining SERPS, site quality, etc - as a matter of fact, Jeremy Shoemaker mentioned it just the other day in his post titled SEO Has No Future. So far though, the theory that Google is using this data is just that - theory. It makes sense. Why else would Google pay $1 for Firefox with Google Toolbar conversions? But as usual with Google, nobody knows for sure (until now?)

Proof That Google Is Using ToolBar Data:

Maybe this is already known by others, but it’s new to me so I’m writing about it because I think you can use it to your advantage - Especially if you create a lot of new sites and you want Google to get them indexed quickly.

A week or so ago, Mubin Ahmed was having trouble with his server. I offered to help and created an account for him on my dedicated server and imported his WordPress blog. He ended up getting another server so his account was only active on my box for a few hours. The only two people that knew the custom URL to the test-blog were Mubin and myself. I don’t think Mubin even visited the test-site, but I visited it several times using Firefox with the ToolBar installed. Once we got Mubin up and running on his own server, I deleted his test blog from my server and deleted the account - remember - total time online only a few hours.

Today while perusing my server logs I noticed something very odd: Several attempted hits to unique URLs that belonged to Mubin’s test-blog. All of those hits were from the Google Bot. The only way that Google could have known that those unique URLs existed is if they were captured while I was visiting those pages. This test-blog had no links from anywhere, and it was only online for a short time. To me this is proof that Google used the data collected via the Toolbar when I visited those pages to add them to the index.

So if you want your new sites found and indexed quickly, it looks like all you have to do is visit it a few times with your toolbar installed - getting a few of your friends to do the same thing might help too.

No biggie - but I thought I would share.

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