Rapid Google Indexing

In August 2007, Matt Cutts (a Google software engineer) wrote a post about Google’s minty fresh indexing picking up new content within a matter of hours. This was a good read and a good way to read how Google’s indexing has changed over time.

I have to admit I thought this applied to more authoritative sites – not smaller blogs like this one (good things come in small packages though) :-).

So I was pleasantly surprised to see my last two blog posts being picked up at lightening speed.

My post on Burger King’s 6 Pack launch was picked up in the hour, but my post this morning about Honda’s skydiving advert was picked up in just over 30 minutes.

Here’s the proof. You can see the post went live at 9:36am…

….and Google picked up the new post in 34 minutes….

Now that is minty fresh indexing!

But alas, the last screen shot also highlights one of my personal bug bares. Blogger doesn’t allow you to provided unique META tags for individual blog posts. Instead, Google picks up the main description tag in the template which then gets used for every blog post. Blogger/Google team, if you’re listening – please make this happen! It will only help the user experience!

Update!.….I’ve been doing some testing with a few recent posts, and Google has lived up to expectations once again. My most recent post on high oil prices hitting the airlines has been indexed in 9 minutes;

Round of applause Google.