SBS and Search Engine Crawling / Indexing

Let me use SBS as a guinea pig one more time, because inevitably you were or will be in the same position I’m in now — with a web site that’s just launched. I’m not all that concerned about my SE rankings since this isn’t a moneymaker for me. But your site is probably designed to be a moneymaker, so you should be interested in the SERPs.

Let’s look at how well those three SEs have crawled and indexed my site:

site:smallbusinesssem.com in Google
site:smallbusinesssem.com in Yahoo
site:smallbusinesssem.com in MSN Search

As of this writing, I have only one page in Google — the home page. I have 8 pages in Yahoo. And in MSN? I have a whopping 207 pages. (There are not 207 pages on this site, but MSN’s crawler is hitting the pages I have from every direction possible — the Category links, the Calendar at left, the Recent Posts at right, etc. So it looks like more content than I really have.)

This proves, to a degree, what’s said in the previous post — that Google and Yahoo rely more heavily on inbound links than MSN. I don’t have many inbound links, so G and Y haven’t bothered to crawl and index much of SBS. On the other hand, MSN isn’t bothered by the lack of inbound links and is practically having relations with this site.

This’ll be worth watching over time, especially in light of Google’s distrust and dislike of new sites. Because of that, most new sites just cannot rank well in Google for many months. Patience is required with Google when you have a new site. Obviously, as the links above suggest, patience is helpful but not required with Yahoo, and totally unnecessary where MSN is concerned.