Hello,

I added 3 sites to Google a few weeks back via the add site and submission of sitemaps. All are in Google bar one that is for a book on someone's experience of torture. Does Google ever look at any particular words more thoroughly?

Also, the site (and sitemap) consists of 1 small page and a large PDF file (15MB), which the webmaster tools flagged as a URL with a slow response. Should I remove the PDF from the sitemap? And does anyone think this may help getting the site into Google?

Any thoughts would be gratefully received.

I added 3 sites to Google a few weeks back via the add site and submission of sitemaps

Well there's your first mistake in thinking that would get the site anything much.
Links are the only thing that will get a site crawled and make it stay in the index. Sitemaps are for use for sites that are having problems with crawling due to technical reasons.

NB: To the usual suspects;
That DOESN'T mean this is another thread for signature link "get more links" posts!!

To continue:
ONE page!! a sitemap! for ONE page!!! just get rid of the sitemap totally and build some decent linking value.

so you cannot find your site searching by the domain name? few weeks is more than enough for google to get the sites indexed. having pdf in sitemap doesnt have anything to do with it. as a workaround, bookmark your site on few popular social bookmarking sites which usually get a new site indexed in less than a day

Thank you for your quick replies and advice. I shall put them in place and see how it goes.

you should focus on off page optimization techniques

No such thing!

You can't "optimise" something you don't control.

Originally Posted by chrishirst

You can't "optimise" something you don't control.

Do you have a special shortcut to paste that sentence?

it still doesn't seem that you say it enough times

Almost as often as;

attributes! not "tags"

How about:

"Links are not optimization"

Originally Posted by jamesrd

Hello,

I added 3 sites to Google a few weeks back via the add site and submission of sitemaps.

There is no need to submit your site to Search engines. Search spiders automatically crawls site and index them in their database.

But make sure you do the following before that to happen

• Try and get relevant links for your site.
• Build good and relevant content in your site so that visitors finds it interesting and there remains a chance you might get some inbound links.
• Submit your site to Social Bookmarking sites like digg, delicious etc.

This will certainly help your site get indexed fast.

Thanks

I guess continue on link building and social bookmarkings to boost your site and get listed in the SE's. Try Digg.com, just participate on social bookmarking sites. and wait for the results.

Im completely lost on SEO, the rules seem to change daily!!!

You just have to be patient, it can take some time to be indexed by google, you can increase the index process by submitting your site to a high pr site such as digg

You don't need a sitemap for one page site.
Get links to your site to be indexed.

What is in that 15MB .pdf file?
If you could create more HTML pages (from that PDF file) around that single page you have....just an idea....

I always abide to this well-known statement: 'Content is king.' No trouble will befall websites that have original content and unique articles. Especially when writing efforts are paired with link building and bookmarking. Yes, diligence is the key to progress.

Thank you for everyones time and suggestions. The site is now in Google and is doing well. It got quite good traffic from the social bookmarking sites and I will continue to invest time in pursuing those. Thanks again.

Originally Posted by gimme4free

Im completely lost on SEO, the rules seem to change daily!!!

That is the beauty of SEO... Due to the automated side of the process, it is impossible for search engines to constantly use the same algorithm...

Google should choose a small country and hire all its citizens to manually rate every single website. How about that?

Without consistent backlink flow then Google could not care less what the content of your site is, because they will simply de-index it over time anyway.