URLs in Web Index

This would be the third revision or up-date to the posting of the web stats showing URLs in Web Index.
The stats relate to this Engineering Web Portal.

The table of data below shows the number URLs or pages in Google's web index. First of all I don't like to generate new site maps that often because of the bandwidth requirements of the sitemap program. That is the program I run needs to check every page I have on the server, so it's a big hit to my server. But if you look at the data and the increasing number of URLs in the web index you will notice that generating a sitemap over and over again is not required.

However I do recommend running a new sitemap if you have a large amount of new pages. The number of URLs in the web index always increases after a site-map is generated. However you'll notice that in some cases the number of indexed pages falls off a few days later. I assume the program reading the sitemap finds the new pages and adds them to the web index, but sometime later another computer algorithm determines the page should not be index and they drop off the index.

01/21/11 = 1,938 urls in web index [Site-map loaded]
11/30/10 = 1,875 urls in web index.
11/04/10 = 1,854 urls in web index.
10/23/10 = 1,805 urls in web index.
07/24/10 = 1,779 indexed pages.  [Site-map loaded]
07/01/10 = 1,535 indexed pages.  [Site-map loaded]
06/30/10 = 1,504 urls in web index.
06/24/10 = 1,455 urls in web index.
06/18/10 = 1,426 urls in web index.
05/31/10 = 1,400 urls in web index.
05/22/10 = 1,394 urls in web index.
04/07/10 = 1,309 urls in web index.
03/27/10 = 1,322 indexed pages. [Site-map loaded]
12/19/09 = 1,481 indexed pages. [Site-map loaded]
12/13/08 = 1,318 indexed pages. [Site-map loaded]

There are two reasons why the number of URLs in the web index are increasing. First I generate at least two or three new pages every month, sometimes many more. So you would except to see an increasing number of pages included in the web index as those new pages are found and included. Secondly I'm always updating preexisting pages already residing on the web-site. So after time the up-dates may allow a page to be indexed, usually because it has more content [text]. Many times I'll add a new page topic that is little more than a graphic and a small description. But over time I get back to up-dating the page to include more data and so on. Once the page gets 'the required amount' of content Google included the URL into the web index.

How soon your new page shows up in the web index, with out a sitemap, depends on how often your pages are crawled. The chart shows that my site has 500 pages crawled every day, although you can't tell from that how many pages are re-crawled. So for my site any new page added is found within a few days, I assume 15 days ~ so I don't really need a sitemap.

Although it has little to do with the number of URLs in the web index, over and over I see new pages not receiving any incoming hits for months. That is even as a new page gets included in the web index, it takes three months for the page to really start getting any visits. Web Masters call that the Google sand box. So don't think that just because a page gets indexed that it will bring in a larger number of hits the next day. Also I have groups or sections of pages that have dropped of the index, for years now. Currently I have 1,946 URLs submitted and 1,875 URLs included. That three month "down-time" is also the same amount of time it takes a page to get a Google Page Rank. [if it ever gets one].

2N3485 Transistor Derating. 3 year old page with zero page rank.
Semiconductor Manufacturers 'L'. 5 year old page with zero page rank.
Electron Tube Classification 2 week old page with 0 page rank.
74L121 Monostable Multivibrator IC. 1 week old page with 0 page rank.

Note always run your site-map generator program at night or when you expect low incoming traffic. Remember that program is talking to your server, which would be in direct competition with your visitors.

Also I have no idea how to determine which pages of my site are not included in the web index, other wise I might fix those pages.

The number of web pages; URLs in web index change every week or so, the numbers listed above are just the ones I wrote down.
. err click the title to read the comments, if you didn't come to this specific topic. The blog compresses the comments section unless you're on that particular page. The comments are updates to the blog post.
.......

URLs in Web Index

I'm going to partially re-post a blog I wrote just a few weeks ago regarding web-pages included in Google's Index. I've only added a dozen pages in the last two months so the increase in the number of pages indexed has to be due the SEO changes being made to pre-existing pages already on the web. The Index History relates to an Engineering Portal on the web.

Index History:
6/30/10 = 1,504 indexed pages.
6/24/10 = 1,455 indexed pages
6/18/10 = 1,426 indexed pages
6/9/10   = 1,411 indexed pages.
5/31/10 = 1,400 indexed pages.
5/22/10 = 1,394 indexed pages.
4/7/10   = 1,309 indexed pages.
3/27/10 = 1,322 indexed pages. [Site-map loaded]
12/19/09 = 1,481 indexed pages. [Site-map loaded]
12/13/08 = 1,318 indexed pages. [Site-map loaded]


 That's not to bad, 12 new pages added, but 100 more pages indexed by Google.

Does the increase in indexed pages imply that all of a sudden the site will start receiving a great many more site visitors, not really. But it does mean that the newly indexed pages will show up in a Google search for that topic, maybe not first in the list but at least they will show up now.

 No Page Rank; Company index 'M'.

I think I'll run a new site map later tonight, once the traffic slows down. I'll get those dozen or so new pages included, and remove a few FAQ pages that have been de-linked over the last few weeks. I did have a few pages that are not being used but still had links pointing to them, but Google dropped them from the index long ago ~ time to removed the link and orphan the pages.
I'll add a comment to this post once Google has time to read the new sitemap.

Graphic; Number of visits to the web site 1/1/10 to 6/29/10 [mid-year update].
Year-to-date = 17.48% increase in visits over the same time period last year [192,858 more visits].

Site has been assigned special crawl rate settings

So I just checked Google Web Master Tools to see how the site was doing [looking for any issues]. Plus I had just up-loaded a new xml sitemap. The last update of the xml site-map was in December, so this new one covers the 20 odd pages added in the last few months.

Anyway, because the site was off-line for a few hours the other day, I checked the crawl rate. I no longer have the option of changing the Google crawl rate [for Googlebot]. Instead of a crawl faster or crawl slower selection I see this message;
Your site has been assigned special crawl rate settings. You will not be able to change the crawl rate.

Under the Crawl errors page I don't see any issues. There are 16 pages not found, but those are all mis-spelled page addresses from other web sites [incoming links], which I can't do any thing about. So I check how GoogleBot is crawling the Engineering web site, all looks well. In fact it seems that over the last three years around 500 pages are crawled per day. Here is the site crawl rate history over the last few years [Engineering Blog with a search term of Crawl]. So what is the deal and what does Special Crawl Rate mean?

I tried a Google web search for the terms 'assigned special crawl rate' and I get a Google News group with dozens of people asking the same thing. Well News-Groups are not that great a place to get information, only because so many people post a reply, just to post with out ever answering the question. Some people said it was for large sites, others replied that they had a small site. Then people would say that's why 1000's of their pages are not indexed [which is different all together].

So I can't answer the question of why your site has been assigned a special crawl rate, because I don't know why my site received it. But I can say that at least for my site, there has been no change in the crawl rate ~ all the way back to 2007. Click the crawl rate graphic for a larger image for year-to-date crawl rates.

I could add to that and say my site does not even require a sitemap, any new page gets spidered with in about a month. Of course this blog gets spidered today, remember blogger is owned by Google. Oh if I didn't already say Google indicates 1,653 urls submitted in the xml sitemap, with 1,322 urls indexed.

Attached graphic; Google Crawl Rate for January 2010 to March 2010.

Sitemap Generation

I updated the html sitemap for interfacebus.com. This is the first update since the interfacebus-sitemap was up-loaded on 12/19/09. So I added in the last 22 web pages generated over the last few months, and removed a few more duplicate entries left over from when the page was generated.

I also went ahead and ran Xenu tonight to check for bad links. Looks like we have 99.17% good links out of 7,396 links. Seems I my have had about 10 bad links listed [which I have already fixed], I assume the other web sites will come back on line in a few hours ~ which is when I'll recheck them.

I'll go ahead and run the xml site-map generator over the week end. So the 22 odd new pages get included in that file and I can re-upload that file to Google. The last time the xml sitemap was generated was around 12/19/09 too.

Graphic; KC-135 Stratotanker Cockpit Instrument Panel [USAF Tanker].

Why do I need an XML Sitemap

I really don't know why I need an XML site map for the search engines, but I just generated one. The last sitemap I generated was just about a year ago; the file was always left out on my server. In fact Google would come out and read the sitemap a few times a month.

Any way the XML site map differs from the html sitemap I generated yesterday; the HTML file is for people, while the XML file is for the search engines.

Just like last year I used GSiteCrawer. The program had crashed several months ago and I finally got around to taking a look at it, turns out I just downloaded it again to get it to work.

So the point is why do I need this file? The thing is the file size is 291k bytes and just burns up bandwidth off my server.

As indicated in the 'New Engineering Pages' blog a new page covering Feed-Through Capacitors was added [to interfacebus.com] at 7 PM last night. When I check at 5 AM today, the page had already been indexed by Google. In fact doing a search for that term returns my page at 49 out of 473,000 results. err, I didn't need a site-map to get a new page indexed hours after I wrote it ....

Whatever; Google indicates that 1,607 URLs were submitted [via the XML file] of which 1,481 URLs [pages] are indexed in their results. Now this differs a bit from the copy it replaced which showed 1,859 pages submitted and 1,328 pages indexed ? My computer also indicate more than 1,600 pages.

Anyhow this week I generated a new human readable sitemap and a new machine readable sitemap ~ that's a good thing.

I don't get it, but I would recommend you generate an XML sitemap for your site [if it's a tad large], many of the generators are free to use or download. You don't even have to tell Google, just add a bit of text to your robots.txt file which all the search engines read. My robots text file is blank right now, but only because I didn't want the other search engines downloading a year old file. But the command is: http://www.YOU.com/sitemap.xml ~ a line of text showing the location of the xml file.

I need a few lines of SEO link building:
2N2904 Derating Curve. Transistor
2N2906 Derating Curve. Transistor
2N6760 Derating Curve. Feild Effect Transistor

The graphic above is a test circuit for testing saturated switching time of a transistor.

Site Map

I ran Xenu last night to generate a new sitemap. The file size stated at better than 1.5 Meg and after many hours of work deleting many duplicate entries the size is dropped below 1Meg. I'm hoping to get it uploaded tonight, which would go well with this posting.

Of course I was doing other things as well; I added a few words to the Knol on Solid State Drives. Of course I added to the blog ~ with this posting. I also updated a few pages, which is normal;
RF Component vendors.
RF Power Divider vendors.
RF Phase Shifters, and so on just to name a few.
Google was telling me that the Phase Shifter page had a short meta description, so I updated a few RF pages.

Graphic; Google Analytics / Map Overlay / Continent view.
Oh the map shows visits, but there have been 3,950,080 page-views so far this year.

Website Site Map

I finally got around to up-loading the latest site map that I generated last month; Engineering Sitemap. I did notice that the previous version at the same location was never saved so I'm not really sure if it could have been found on the internet. The previous up-load date was 8/1/08 and the page address has no page rank even after 10 months on the internet...

Seems to be there now. But the pages out under Google Sites only bring in 10 visits/month to the main Engineering Site ~ which is not good.

Here are a few pages that are generating the least amount of pages views this year [in the single digits]:

BJT Multivibrator Definitions.

2N6758 Derating Graph.

2N6762 Derating Graph.

2N6766 T1 Package Derating Graph.

2N5002 Derating Graph.

Electrostatic Volatage Definition.

Cable Retractor Definition.

High Speed Serial Trace Specification.

How To Design a Chassis, Index.

Broadband over Power Line.

Rackmount Computer Vendors.

Computer Publications.

I'm sure there are dozens if not hundreds more that could be listed, but many of these are new pages.

Googlebot Crawl Stats

Here is the latest graph on Googlebot crawl stats, or how often the Googlebot spider checks interfacebus.com. For reference, the previous Googlebot crawl rate.

The previous 90 days ending in October showed an average of 452 pages spidered each day, while this chart shows 523 pages a day.

The amount of data down-loaded has increased to over 6,405k bytes [6Meg], but the time spent downloading the information has decreased by 100mS. So the spider is reading more data faster, which is good.
July crawl rate.
Sep 07 crawl rate.
Jan to July o7 crawl rate.

External Web Linking

Here is a listing of web page addresses with only one external page link from another web site. In most cases the external link is really coming from the web site's sitemap, which is located on another server.

The list only indicates a total of 1,032 pages, while the main sitemaps page indicates 1,414 URLs.

How to Derate a Connectors.

Limiting the maximum current used by connector pins.

How to Derate Power Supplies.

How to Derate Switches.

Manufacturers of DC-to-DC Converter ICs.

A list of Voltage Converter IC vendors.

Joystick for the Apple IIc computer.

An out dated interface on the Apple Computer.

PC104 Board Dimensions.

Graphic of PC-104 card.

Manufacturers of Embedded Backplanes.

Industrial or non-commercial Back-Planes.

Listing of Single Board Computer Form Factors.

Sizes of SBC formats.

Manufacturers of Cable Clamps.

Companies that produce cable clamps.

Strain Relief Manufacturers.

Definition of Gray Code.

Hex Symbol Table.

Some of these pages should have showed up in the 'what's new blog' in addition to the sitemap, but must be missing. Having external web links help increase the page ranking of the page being linked to. But the page linking in needs to have a page rank of its own.

Sitemap Generator

I up-loaded a new XML sitemap to Google [Google, Webmaster Tools, Sitemaps]. The current XML sitemap contains 1,859 submitted URLs, as reported by Google. The previous XML sitemap was last up-loaded on August 16th and contained 1,727 URLs. So 132 new pages were added to the web site over the last 4 months. The last site map caused 1,318 URLs to be indexed by Google.

During this same time frame 968 html files were changed or up-dated in some fashion. However the up-dates could be just html fixes in some cases.

The program GSiteCrawler is used to spider the site and generate an XML Sitemap. Because of the bandwidth required I only generate a sitemap once every few months. The program has to check every page on the web site. But once the site map is generated and up-loaded to the server the bandwidth usage remains the same. Google reads the sitemap once every few days regardless of how old it is. So if Google is going to download the sitemap from the server it may as well be up to date.

Other search engines find the site map via a comment in the robots.txt file on the server. That comment happens to point to another web site which also holds the sitemap.xml file. So only Google downloads the sitmap from my server, all other search engines get the same file from another server [saving me bandwidth].

I also started to update the HTML version of the sitemap, the human readable version. I added 18 new page addresses to the sitemap that had been added to the site from 8/16 to 10/16. I up-loaded what I had and will add the previous two months as time permits.

A few days ago I spidered the site using Xenu to check for broken web links. Xenu indicates 2% of the 6,105 URLs on the site were bad. However giving them a few days to come back proved that only about a dozen URL links were really gone. I did end up deleting or removing a few links.

Google Sites

I've generated about 17 pages out on Google Sites, most are copies from my "old" Google Page Creator site. I have taken a few pages off line, but most pages are still up on the old site, with a note pointing to the new Google Sites page 'interfacebus'.

I just added the tracking code from Google Analytics, so now the pages have a counter. By Monday I should see some data, assuming anyone has found those pages yet.

I also added the code to generate a Google Sitemap for the site. Not really sure why Google has you generate a Site-map, shouldn't they know about web pages that reside on their own site?

I still have a lot of gif files out on Page Creator that I really need to move

Web Pages Updates and Graphics

Following last weeks running of Xenu to check for 'bad' links, many of the re-directed links have been up-dated. Remember, links that are re-directed are not broken...

During this same time graphic files from my Google Page Creator site are being moved to a new storage location. To reduce server bandwidth many picture files are stored out on Google Page Creator, and not on the interfacebus server. But, Google is closing that 'beta' program so a new storage location needs to be found. Errors can occur while up-dating the html code as the pic file addresses are up-dated. Xenu will need to be run ounce again to find any of these new errors.

The Google Page Creator site also held html pages which need to be relocated. Google has a new html generation program called Google Sites. Today I added nine new pages to Google Sites, which are copies of the old Google Page Creator program. All of the new pages added today really just hold a graphic, like the previous site, but the graphic was deleted from Page Creator in favor of a link to the new page.

I'm still not happy that instead of fixing Google Page Creator, they decided to close the sites. I started my site in 2006, that's 2 years of generating a 'page rank' and other people finding my pages and linking to me. This mentality of keeping all services as beta, for years, is BS. My pages were 'in addition' to my main site, supporting the site ~ what about those people that started an on-line bussiness using Page Creator?

Here is the new address for the new site interfacebus, hit the sitemap link on the left menu bar to see all the pages. Again, these pages only hold a graphic, and their new. No pages link to them and there are no page to page links, other than the sitemap. Any page on the main site 'interfacebus.com' will still be linking to the older site.

I've also completed a few Knols in the last few weeks, but I'm not sure how to indicate how to find them. Google seems to be .... what? I don't get it. Search "knol" on Google, then search "RS232" ~ you will then find that knol, with links to the other knols; hint [RS-232].

Time to spider the site again

This week end I'll run the Xenu spider again to check for bad links. Some time after that I'll run the GsiteCrawler to generate an xml site map to upload to Google web-master tools [after I fix any issues found by the Xenu crawler]. I never run a crawler during normal office hours, as they put a strain on the server. Both Crawlers have to check each page on the server; or 1523 active pages and 209 inactive pages.

I've updated 1,440 pages since the Xenu program was run, but most have been html up-dates [a few gif files may be included in that count]. However; I've hand checked most pages over that time so I should not find that many issues. I was running the spider program once a month, but it seemed to miss a few issues so I've been hand checking links. The last check by the program indicated 5,978 links

Twenty new pages were added to the site since 6/7/08, so it's about time for a Google site map via GsiteCrawler. There may be a few page-to-page link updates that have been made as well, but not many ~ should make a more up to date site-map regardless.

Most of the page up-dates are due to one or more of these issues [most updated at the same time / page]:

Java script code change for Google Analytics [page visit counter]
Java script code change for Google Ads
Removal of all Java Script code for Google Referral Ads [program terminated]
Removal of two different meta tags [html coding issues, redundant un-required code]
Re-direct gif links as Google pages go out of service [Google web site terminated]
Java script code change for the Google Search Bar [ Code up-date, but not required]
Non-US ['dot'com] pages getting the html rel 'no follow' code [html non visible change]

The attached pic is of a Georgia map indicating 188 visits from that country so far this year. Russia just invaded them.....

New Sitemap Up-loaded

Using the GsiteCrawler program two separate XML site maps were generated, one for interfacebus.com and one for serialphy.com. Google reports 109 urls (pages) uploaded for serialphy and 1673 urls for interfacebus.

Looks like more than 50 new pages have been added over the last 3 months, sense the last sitemap generation. However the site's HTML site map was updated as new pages were added.

Google Analytics reports 985,815 visits, with 1,880,906 page views. Both of those numbers are down from the same time last year, by 15,000 visits (it was off-line yesterday).....

GsiteCrawler is free like half a dozen other programs that generate xml sitemaps.

Web Site Optimization vs Bandwidth

I up-loaded the xml sitemap for interfacebus up to my site on Google Pages. The xml site map is used by search engines to determine the page addresses of all pages located on a web site. Search engines find your site map via a command within your robots.txt file. Up until now the robots.txt file indicated the site map was out on my server. The sitemap started on my server because Google Sitemaps does not give you the option of having the map in another location.

However, all other search engines find the sitemap via the robots text file. So Google will still check the site map, and hit my bandwidth, but now all the other search engines will go out to Google pages to access the sitemap.

The xml site map is 284k bytes in size and was viewed [down-loaded] 43 times last month. That's over 12 MBytes of server bandwidth. Yes I'm still trying to reduce bandwidth; currently running at 58.35kB/visit.

The html version of the sitemap [used by people] has been viewed 631 times this year. At the bottom of the sitemap is a list of the html pages located on 'Google Pages'; however the xml file will not be listed. The html viewable sitemap is also out on the Google server, saving server bandwidth..

The attached graphic shows the search trend for the term "miniPCI". I checked after my Analytics report indicated only three hits to the miniPCI page on the site [that's 3 hits for the year]. However it looks like I viewed data for a 404 page. The active MiniPCI pages has seen 3,377 page views. The page covering the MiniPCI 100-pin Signal Assignments page has received 333 page views, while the page covering the 124-pin MiniPCI card has received 3,497 page views.

Operating Fuses using AC or DC Voltages

I was reading one of the usenet groups the other day, and came across a posting I replied to. The poster was asking about available voltage ranges for fuses {AC voltages}, as he could not find the [absolute] correct voltage rating for a fuse. My reply was basically a quote right off the page for Manufacturers of Fuses.

"The voltage rating of the fuse does not indicate the operational voltage of the fuse. The voltage rating determines the maximum voltage that will not jump the gap between the elements after the fuse has already blown. So the fuse will operate at the rated voltage and any voltage below the rating. "

Someone replied back indicating that in fact I was not correct and that;

".. DC is a more severe condition. ... You should not use an AC rated fuse in a DC circuit. ..."

Followed by another poster who had this to say;

"The AC/DC differential tends to be glossed over a lot .... . One way this shows up as physical difference in AGC style fuses is that DC rated fuses are often ceramic rather than glass, presumably to contain the arc."

I took note of that reply and turned to the internet to research the issue. I came across a site that seem to indicate the same thing I was saying. In the mean time others replied as well. I posted the quote I found on the internet and also a quote from a US Military Standard.

"... once the fuse has opened, any voltage less than the voltage rating of the fuse will not be able to "jump" the gap of the fuse. Because of the way the voltage rating is used, it is a maximum rms voltage value. ..."

MIL-PRF-23419: Fuse selection: The following steps should apply in the selection of a fuse for any application: Step 1: Select a fuse with a voltage rating equal to or in excess of the circuit voltage.

Ya know, if it's good for the government. In fact the third section of MIL-PRF-23419 indicates this:

1.2.1.3 Voltage rating. The voltage rating is the maximum dc or ac root mean square (rms) voltage for which a fuse is designed (see 3.1). The voltage rating is identified by a numerical value followed by the letter "V".

In fact if one of the "/" documents are referenced you'll find that the maximum voltage rating provided does not indicate AC or DC values, just 125 V [MIL-PRF-23419/H].

It appears that the newsgroup thread has ended [at least until the week end], but I kept looking into the voltage issue. I came across data that I intend to add to a new page covering the Difference between AC & DC Fuses. Because of this blog entry, generating that new page, up-dating the sitemap, and adding a new page to the What's new Blog; the new page is just a copy of a per existing page with a new page address. I should get some data out there within 12 to 24 hours.

Caution; always check the IEC, NEC or any other standards body that regulates Fuses. Never rely on the web for information when it comes to personal safety.

New COTS Board Format

Ruggedized Enhanced Design Implementation [REDI]:

A new VME card format is out for release aimed at the new VPX and VXS VME card standards [EURO Card]. The new REDI standard adds much more than just a mechanical standard defined in the IEEE-1101 mechanical standard. The new REDI specification changes much from the old IEEE1101 spec and now tries to handle water cooled devices as well; in addition, to air cooled and conduction cooled boards.

What garbed my eye was the new card formats, really the same 3U/6U sizes, would now handle up to 500 watts. What? how big is my power supply now. The largest power supply I could purchase was 750 watts, now I have to provide 500 watts per slot. The only REDI backplane I've seen appears to be four slots or 2000 watts. How much does a 2000W power supply weigh, I assume it's a switching power supply.

Very few companies are producing VPX boards or VXS boards which are both still new card specifications. In addition, to date, both the VPX cards and VXS cards seems to comply with the older IEEE1101 standard and not the new VITA48 standard [which is yet to be released?].

Note: To make this blog post add a new web page, and add it to the sitemap I had to cut a corner. The two new pages that cover REDI or IEEE1101 listings are copies of another page, with additional notes ~ they are not ready to be released yet. But, no one should be able to find them other than from this blog listing. Also my main computer has begun malfunctioning, forcing me to my backup system.

I'll fix this post over the week end and expand to the posting via comments. The new pages will also be updated this week end, and will link the VPX description to the REDI page and the VME description to the IEEE1101 specification page.

Related links: Equipment Chassis Manufacturers.

Why do I need backlinks

Backlinks are incoming links to a web page either from a page that's part of the same site or an external page on someone else's web site. Backlinks are also known as incoming links, inbound links, inlinks, and inward links.

Backlinks provide two benefits to a web page [site]. First, a backlink brings in visitors to your page. Second, a backlink provides pagerank [PR] to the page being linked to.

A page, that has a pagerank, will pass a portion of that pagerank to all the other pages it links to. A page with a page rank of 5 will pass 'x' amount PR to each page it points to. The more pages it points to the less pagerank is passed to each page. So the page that points to you passes you some amount of pagerank.

Server Analytics refer to backlinks as Traffic Sources, or Referring Sites. The server stats indicate that over the last month there have been 14,167 visits from 1,402 sources [backlink] to interfacebus.com. These are sites that link to me on their own, I stopped looking for referral sites years ago.

Last night I updated the search bar on 20 pages and in the process found a few bad links. I also added the tag rel="nofollow" to a few listings to preserve some of my own page rank. You do not pass page rank when you use the 'nofollow' tag.

I updated the sitemap again today reducing the number of redundant links. Remember that site map does not reside on "my" site, so they are all backlinks.

I added a new page to the site yesterday and made a comment in my what's new blog, providing a link to the new page [backlink].

I was in the newsgroups today, posted a reply to some ones comment. I left this blog address as my sig ~ that's a backlink.

Anyone see a pattern here?

New Site Uploaded

I spent the last few days fixing the site map that is generated from running Xenu. The generated site map starts with a great many redundant page listings, so I have to go in and remove a lot of them. The current page size for the sitemap is 505kB, while the one already on the web is 462kB.

I'll go ahead and upload the new map and up-date over the rest of the week. My system indicates 1143 html files [pages], as does Google. Google indicates I have 1444 indexed urls, and a total of 1606 total URLs. The difference is due to a number of orphan pages that capture misspelled page addresses.

Any way the 80 odd pages that were generated over the last few months are now part of the sitemap, and now have an external page link that points to them.

Search engine optimization

Search engine optimization [SEO] is the process of configuring or setting up your web site so that it is search engine friendly. It really accounts for much more than that by insuring that a web page ranks high in a search result via key word placement. "Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the search results or the higher it "ranks", the more searchers will visit that site." I practice SEO; I make sure the title or page address relates to the topic, insure the first paragraph describes the topic and so on.

Any way, I just ran the program Xenu to validate the links on the site. The robot found only four bad links, and a ton of redirects. I don't think many of these companies practice SEO. They seen to change web names, redirect to a new address for awhile and than go back to the old address.... I really don't get it. I don't even list a few companies any longer because I continue to see dead pages as they keep changing their page addresses...

I should be up-loading a new sitemap tomorrow once I get a chance to delete some of the redundant listings in the report. I also ran Gsitecrawler and generated an XML sitemap for the search engines, Google is still checking it.

On a side note, the web site seems to be going well. Download speed is being increased by deleting HTML comments, or breaking up large pages into smaller pages ~ and making the pages more focused on one particular topic. Adding a search bar to all the pages, so the site may be searched from any page. Changing the search bar so that it defaults to a website search and not the web [some pages had search bars that searched the web, while some defaulted to searching the site which could be a little confusing. I also continue to add more pages, better than 80 pages in the last four months. Google now indicates 1606 URLs submitted.

Site / Server bandwidth remains at 57kB/visits, but I think the savings from reducing the html comments is being off-set by adding the search bar to the hundred's of pages that did not have one.

Not really web site related, but I've been trading out the older google referral links in favor of their new referral code. The newest code selects one of a hundred ads, while their old code would only run google related products ~ Adwords, firefox and so on. Plus the html code is smaller in most cases as one referral link may replace three other older google referrals.

Jan 2008 was the best month ever in terms of visits, and from the site history this month should be even better. March is higher than Jan, while Feb is lower January. New content is always being added, and html coding mistakes are fixed as they are found. ~ All is well