A Google Indexing Surprise

Here's something I find pretty amazing. There are lots of articles all over the internet on how to obtain a high ranking in Google, and it usually involves building lots and lots of backlinks that point to your own site. So people endlessly write articles and place them on the articles websites, and post blog comments and forum posts which include a link to their own site...all done in the hope that someday their site will be ranked in Google because of this. Well, something just happened to me that makes it appear that it doesn't matter so much how MANY backlinks you have as much as the quality of the websites that you have the backlinks from.

I have a very small and simple blog I've set up to help me sell items in the local newspaper. A few posts ago I mentioned this, and the only attention it ever got was from the newspaper readers who saw it in the ad. Then of course the newspaper stopped allowing websites to be listed in the free classified ads, so I got a little discouraged because that ended what I thought was a great idea. I didn't get nearly the number of hits when I only included a phone number in the ad and mentioned the domain name on my phone's voice mail.

Then I tried selling a couple of items on http://www.craigslist.com/, where you can apparently include a link to your own website in your ads. I was a little disappointed in the results because although my sales blog got it's share of instant traffic after listing the ads, it still wasn't resulting in any Google AdSense ad clicks, which I had hoped for. However, something unexpected came out of this, just a week or so after I posted those Craiglist ads.

I checked my blog's stats on http://www.statcounter.com/ and was very surprised to see that one of the hits was referred by none other than Google itself! I knew that meant that the page had somehow been indexed by Google! And it has, as of today anyway when I checked. So with no backlinks at all other than the ones (I think a total of just 2) from Craiglist, my little blog site has been included in the mighty Google's listings! Someone had apparently entered "220 volt air conditioner for sale Delaware"as their search request, and it gave them a list of sites, with mine being #2 on the list! (Second only to a listing on the University of Delaware website.)

This is pretty amazing! I was under the impression that Google wouldn't find and include your site unless you had a certain (fairly large) number of sites which link back to it...but this is obviously not true.

So fear not, aspiring web masters...it's not nearly as difficult to crack into those elusive Google listings as most of us thought! I don't know in how many cases it would be appropriate to place a link to your own website in a classified ad on Craigslist, but the point is that this is a high traffic website, and evidently just one high traffic website linking to your own is enough to get Google's attention. And that was news to me!

TinyURL, The Free URL Shortening Service

When you're promoting ClickBank products or other affiliate deals, sometimes those affiliate links can be rather lengthy. Too lengthy to even be readable in some emails, forum posts, etc. So there are lots of free services you can use that actually forward to your link from a different address to allow you to have a shorter url to use.

One of the most popular free link shortening services is http://www.tinyurl.com/. I had seen it before many times but never actually tried it until now, and I was suprised how easy it is to use. Like I said, you'll find lots of free services like this if you do a search, but this one doesn't force your readers to see any ads before your own page, which I've noticed some do. And since it's so popular it seems to make sense that it should be reliable as well. Plus, it always gives you a url that ends up being, true to their name, pretty darn tiny! Be aware that it doesn't actually HIDE your true url - that's actually considered "link cloaking" and is a little more involved - but it does allow people to access your link by just using the shorter one it sets up for you.

If you'd like to try it out, I've put a toolbar right at the top of this page to make it easy to find and use. And it is totally free to use, which you've just gotta love! Can you imagine how many hits that site must get? They state that it's in the hundreds of thousands of hits per month, so that could add up to quite an interesting little Google AdSense check each month for them I'll bet! Must be nice, huh?!