Archive for May, 2009
How To Get Your Google Profile Indexed
In December 2007, Google released the first incarnation of the Google Profile. This was the beginning of a continued effort from Google to refactor numerous services to have a more modular architecture, so that key pieces of information were held in one place only.
In a recent upgrade to Google Profiles, the vanity URL was introduced. A vanity URL is a label or string that a user can associate to their account so that other people can find them more easily. Some services allow a user to enter anything they like, other services derive the vanity URL from the account user name – which is the tact that Google have taken.
While a user can provide quite a bit of information about themselves within their Google Profile and also link or consume data from other services within it – it did not automatically mean that the profile would be visible within Google Search. Users are required to check a box, with the label “Display my full name so I can be found in search” – before the profile is visible within search engines.
After checking that box quite some time ago, I was confused that no matter how many pages I went back through the search results for a vanity search – that I couldn’t find my Google profile listed. I had assumed that by checking that box, that it’d trigger Googlebot to crawl the profile and place it into the search index. Failing that, I had thought that since Google were publishing the Google Profiles into XML sitemaps, that would have also sufficed to get my profile within Google Search – both of which were incorrect assumptions.
It would appear that Google Profiles are subject to all of the same indexation restrictions and issues that a normal web page is. If you’re struggling to get your Google Profile indexed, the sure fire way is to link to it from a page already indexed or somewhere that you know will get crawled by search engines shortly.
YouTube Subscriptions & Unexpected Notification Behaviour
I use the YouTube subscription feature to try and keep on top of a swarm of excellent video content being provided through YouTube.
In my account settings, under the Email Options section I have all of the default options selected – which equates to email me whenever something in my account or channel changes and also send me a weekly email regarding my subscriptions.
The Google Webmaster Central team have a Google Webmaster Central YouTube Channel which I’m subscribed to. I’m not the kind of person that will login to a site, such as YouTube, just to check on things – such as a subscription. For this very reason, I was happy to see that YouTube support email notifications for subscriptions.
Over the last couple of months, I’d assumed that the Google Webmaster Central channel was largely inactive as the weekly email was showing only a handful of publications over that period. It wasn’t until today that I clicked through to the channel and noticed a plethora of fantastic question and answer style content from Matt Cutts.
I had expected that when new videos were published into a channel I’m subscribed to, that the weekly email notification would essentially be a digest of the changes from the week.
This serves as a simple warning for the uninitiated, check the videos tab against each of your subscriptions from time to time or you could be missing out on great video content.