Eau Claire Wisconsin Real Estate
Ok so here it is, what I hinted about the other day.
I have seen so many posts about the new channels feature, literally dozens. So many people were confused by this. I actually did quite a bit of research on the subject. I think I spent almost a week studying site structures trying to understand this better. I guess I had my own selfish goals in mind because I wanted to make sure that my site was ok, but it turns out that I learned a lot about Active Rain and just what these guys have been up to!
Well probably most of us AR members have a site right? I mean thats probably a given. But how many of us have a site with literally hundreds of thousands of pages? How about millions of pages? (I would actually be curious to learn just how large AR is.) Well put on your thinking hats for a moment and bare with me here because some of this is going to get technical. I promise to keep it as simple as possible (kiss)
OK so like I was saying none of us have a site like AR. None of us will probably ever have 100,000+ people writing new content each day for our sites. So what I am saying here basically applies to how Google deals with this mess, because believe me it would be a mess. I apologize to the dozen sites that I got all this information from. I did this research the week that the Channels feature came out. I thought they did a very good job of explaining how it works but I think some people were still a bit confused.
OK so if we still have our thinking hats on imaging all those pages. Well Google has a big job, a REALLY BIG JOB. It has to read all this crap err I mean lovely content that we write each day. Well believe me when I say Google is very excited about doing the job, in fact Google bots love fresh content, but the problem is that there is so much to read. How exactly can Google do it? Well it works like this:
Google tries to store each page in their index. This is good because this is what makes it searchable (this is how customers find us!) The problem like I keep saying is that there is just so much to read. Google tries very hard reading it and they send dozens of bots after a large site. But the problem is that the faster they try to tear through all the information, the more stress it puts on the servers. You can have all the fastest servers in the world like Google does for instance and yet it would still put enormous pressure on the servers to stay afloat. Imagine trying to support 100,000+ users accessing the data from all over the place! Then toss in a bunch of bots trying to read it all! Its a mess!
Well again I am simplifying here, but when we write the content we are telling Google, HEY READ MY STUFF ITS GREAT ITS THE BEST! Google says OK, OK I will be there in a minute! Then the next person yells the same thing, wash, rinse, repeat.. You get the drift? Google is all over the place trying to read this. What starts to happen is that so much content is being generated that the Google bots simply cant keep up! If they push any harder they will take the whole dang server down with it. I think and I may be wrong here, but that is probably why some of you have noticed at various times certain bugs plaguing the system. Its just overloaded. (I have no way of knowing I don't work at AR)
OK so now you probably understand the problem better right? Its basically just too much generated each day and no good way to access it. Well now we have to understand how Google reads large sites. I mean BIG sites. REALLY BIG SITES. Imagine the number of pages generated in the first year which has increased exponentially each year since. Now imagine in 5 years, 10, 20 years...
Well like I was saying earlier when you write new content and you start yelling at the Google taxi to pick it up this is how sites are indexed. Each time you write a page Google wants to index it. What Google does is follow a link structure through the Active Rain site. Now when we post something Google first has to go to the home page, this can be called the entry point, then it has to go through several other links, such as our profile or our blog, until it finally makes its way to our new post. For every path Google has to take it consumes time and resources. The bots only have so long to try to index it and then move on. Hey they got stuff to do! 300 other people just called Taxi at the same time. Like I said before, not only is this time consuming, it puts a huge strain on the server. The server has to hold up and keep the links open or else Google wont find the new content.
I wanted to include some numbers here because it really is important to be able to picture this in your heads. The basics of what I have been saying is that if you take a look at Google Webmaster Tools for instance and look at your own site for a moment you can see how many pages the bot reads and how long it stays. The problem here is that I been simplifying things a bit too much.
Well there are two types of bots. What?! Yes two. Well who knows really if they are different but there are two main functions that bots do. One is to spider a site.
This means they crawl the site looking for new information. The job here isn't to index each page its just meant to lightly touch down and get a sense or a feel. The other bot is meant to index the pages and make them available for searches. Well the goal then since we are writing all this content is to have Google index it all. But the web is such a large place Google simply cant index it all. It is an impossible job and instead they do the best they can and at least try to spider it. What happens though is that some pages will never get spidered and some will never get indexed. When I said numbers before I meant to show something important. Some sites it is calculated that it would literally take years and years for Google to index all the content. If you consider that on many of these large sites the content grows at an exponential rate Google will never catch up either.
Has your head started to spin yet? 
What can we do to help?
Well of course we all want our blogs to be indexed so this should be important to everyone. Like I was saying before, Google likes to follow links. It likes to see where they lead to and hopefully it finds good stuff at the end of the trail. The more links to a site, the more entry points created. So its not always the home page that Google starts its search from. Every time you link to a blog post you are creating a new entry point. What Google does after it gets there is a mystery but I have read then it probably continues to try to index. So the more entry points created we are actually helping Google read the site. But again the problem is that even if you create millions of entry points, go ahead and do it the AR staff would love this :) , you still cant keep up with all the content.
Well dang it that sucks, there must be a way. Well there is. Channels. Yes after this many pages I finally get to Channels! LOL.
What these Channels do is nicely sort out all the data for Google. We still want all those entry points and so does AR but we also want a nice easy path for Google to follow. This is what that nice video was hinting at when they announced the new feature.
This is an example of what the old structure looked like.
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http://activerain.com/ogormask
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http://activerain.com/blogs/ogormask
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http://activerain.com/blogs/tags/technology
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http://activerain.com/blogsview/763334/Bad-Economy-LinkedIn++-MmmH-GOOD
Now that link structure is probably not correct. I don't know how exactly Google finds each post because I just don't have access to that information but as you can see there is five “clicks” Google must make before it gets to my post. In fact there probably is even more than that. Well compound this by 100,000+ members and Houston we have a problem. This is highly inefficient and wasteful.
Now check out the new structure that Channels have added.
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http://activerain.com/action/channels/home_buying
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http://activerain.com/blogsview/750118/Crash-08-Should-You-Be-Scared
We have a nice easy path to follow. 3 clicks and Google is there. Well I don't think I need to get into how this is possible but you can see that it makes a huge difference. This is why AR has asked for your help to sort out our stuff. We were like kids and tore the website apart. We have our dirty clothes all over the floor. Lets pick up the stuff and if you check out my other post you get free points for the assist! Cant complain about that. I realize this info is a bit late but I still see so many questions. I also apologize I couldnt find that white board video they posted about the subject.
I hope you guys enjoyed this post. I am sure its full of technical errors. Please let me know and I will fix it. I apologize again for not providing citations. I didn't steal any information. I did however consolidate the information found on dozens of sites and hundreds of articles.
So in the end shorter is better. Shallow site structures rock and the bonus is that it makes it easy to navigate for both man and machine. Even if your site is small it can truly benefit from this type of structure.
If you would like to work with an agent who is leading the way call 715-894-1001 today or send me a email.
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