I was having problems getting Google to index many of my pages for http://www.buy-discount-cheap-online.com because they’ll only follow so many links deep into a site. Well, my site goes tooooooooons of links deep with no real way of getting to those pages other than through it’s parents.
In trying to solve this problem I created a site map. The site map pulls random (not totally random, but it seems that way) pages from my site and displays them in pages of 90 links each. Google says that if your site map has more than 100 links on it to put them on multiple pages. So that’s what I did. I put 90 links/page and put on each page a link to the next page which has 90 different links.
Then I had another idea. What if I put links on each page to a random site map page? Considering that I have like 700,000 pages right now, I have thousands of site map pages. I didn’t think google was ever going to follow all of the site map pages one by one, so I put a link on each page to another random site map page. Then, since I don’t really care that much about the links on my pages, I put 5 links on each page to site map pages. So now, each page I have has a link to the main site map page, plus five other links to random site map pages.
The results of doing this were awesome. Before I put up the site map page, google had indexed 33 pages of mine. When I put up the initial site map, they indexed 50 pages in about a week and then about 50 more in another week. Then when I put up the 5 links/page to site map pages, google almost immediatly index 500 pages. And this is all during the month, before google does their monthly dance/re-index. I’m hoping that when google does their monthly re-indexing they’ll get thousands of my pages.
All because of a site map.