No Mod Required

Digital Graffiti Letter R Wild Styles- Rob Larsen : DrunkenFist.com

According to Analytics it’s the fourth most popular page on my site with 3,892 page views over the past month accounting for nearly 3% of all page views on the site. A lot of those are entry views because, up until last Friday, this page showed up on the first page of this search- “graffiti - Google Image Search”

Let me say- Arrgh!

With some sleuthing I discovered what was up. Googling the page itself returned this result:

Which means my host throttled spider traffic at the exact wrong moment… I don’t blame them really. Spiders crawl my site like worms in a compost pile (have I mentioned I started a compost pile?) so slowing them down from time to time is not a bad idea. Still, with only a couple of exceptions there’s not a worse page on my site for this to happen to, so I’d prefer to never have the spider traffic throttled on this particular page.

The good thing is, between this blog post and the fact that I independently added a link to that page from the front page of my site* the 503 should be replaced with the original content shortly and I’ll hopefully bubble back up to the top. I’ll monitor it and report what I find here.

[edited to add] It’s finally back in the index and now returns the #2 result for the “graffiti” image search. Which kicks the donkey’s ass.

*it’s an experiment in focusing click user action on the home page. Based on my analytics, most people are here for art and that’s a very popular image, so I figured I’d combine a popular image with a link to see if that will get people clicking into the gallery flow and cut down on the number of one and done exits from my home page. Getting people into the gallery flow is a big deal for me as people will often click through each and every gallery image on the site and even if they fail to do that, people in the gallery flow will often generate dozens of page views. While some people are calling them dead as a metric, with a site like this I still like page views.

I was poking around the net yesterday, looking to see how to submit my sitemap (generated using the excellent sitemap generation tool available from enarion.net) to Ask, when I discovered (in their FAQs) a technique for Sitemaps Autodiscovery. Which is a cool feature of the new sitemaps protocol. Add this line to your robots.txt file:

SITEMAP: http://www.yoursite.com/path-to-your-sitemap.xml

and any spiders that support the sitemap protocol will know where to find the fruits of your sitemap labor. Now I know as well as anyone that Google rules the roost in terms of generating search engine traffic, and managing google’s use of your sitemap is pretty straightforward using the Google Webmaster Tools, but there are always new search engines popping up and getting in on their action can still generate some traffic. It’s especially cool to do so with a with a passive technique like this.

When you’ve got definite traffic goals for a site (as I do here) every little bit helps.

What I still can’t figure out is how to get MS’s Live Search to use the damned thing. Maybe this is the technique? They support the sitemaps protocol but, the last time I checked, there was no way to point them towards the document.