Oct
24
Being in the middle of site updates in preparation for the Holiday season since July/August, I started to think about how the seasonal cycle used to work with Google’s monthly update cycle, and about how things are now.
There was a once_a_month update (called the Dance - blech), and then they crawled. The crawl would be reflected in the next monthly update. So to be ready in time to be included in the crawl, you had to count backwards and start working on a site for any holiday or special occasion during the year about 3 months prior to when you wanted the new pages to be included in the index. In fact, even farther back than that, since it can take getting some good inbound links and doing a little on-page tweaking to get the rankings where they’ll be satisfactory - and again, there was a time-delay factor with being re-crawled, getting new links counted and PR updated and having the modified rankings included in the update.
Not so any more. New sites are delayed getting Google rankings, even though they can be included in the index soon enough, and for existing sites inclusion of new pages is much quicker and so are rankings reflected. It can take mere days to see the results of updating a site.
Then comes Yahoo, formerly using Google search and now using their own search technology since early this year. The old Inktomi pay-for-inclusion some of us loved was a blessing, with only a modest annual fee and fresh crawling and updating a matter of days. Not any more, now that Yahoo has acquired Inktomi and replaced Inktomi search with their own search technology. The old PFI has been replaced by PFI (pay- for-inclusion) with a PPC (pay-per-click) component added - not at all cost effective in many cases, particularly for small businesses with low margin or profit line, which would make such PPC anything but cost-effective - and also be limited by modest finanacial resources.
So the thing to do now, for as reliable a Holiday promotion model where straight, organic SEO is concerned (aka free search engine listings) is to stay with the concept of an annual schedule, watch and figure out Yahoo’s crawl and update schedule, and try to work with that as best as can be done.
Without having enough of a track record to have seen an established pattern, it just may be that it’ll have to be a six month window of preparing sites in advance for any type of seasonal promotion, sprinkling salt over the left shoulder where Google is concerned, focusing on and watching Yahoo carefully for a while, keeping fingers crossed and taking it from there until more is known.