Launching a New Site - GoFuckYourself.com

Tent Pitcher · 06-03-2014, 03:02 PM

Part 1 - Launching a New Site

There is no point in reading any further if you don't have quality, original content. Sure, you can use shady SEO tricks, buy traffic, or re-post other people's content and maybe you'll make a few bucks doing it, but this series is about dealing with mainstream search engines - and they are constantly evolving to stay ahead of the cheats and shortcuts that you'll readily find on the internet. There are plenty of people who will sell you ways to increase your search engine rank, however, you will never be able to sustain it long term. If you truly want to build a brand in this crowded space, then you need to be on good terms with the two big players in search, and that means playing by their rules.

These days there are really only two mainstream search engines to be concerned with, Bing and Google. Targeting these guys also takes care of Yahoo and Ask.com as they are just mildly reformulated results from the other two respectively. Of course there are other mainstream search engines out there, but it is generally not worth the time to target them as decent rankings on Bing and Google will eventually land you there anyway. Plus, in terms of overall search traffic, you aren't looking at a lot of leads from their smaller counterparts.

Site Development

I recommend not "publishing" your site until you have the first iteration complete and ready for public consumption. While the definition of publishing your site varies depending on how you have it hosted, the idea is to prevent the search engines from noticing your site and associating the domain name with the unfinished content. The easiest way to do this is to use a robots.txt file to block the search engines from indexing your site while it is under development. Both Bing and Google have what are considered to be well-behaved spiders, meaning mainly that they will honor the contents of your robots.txt file and essentially ignore your site. To do this, create a file called robots.txt with any text editor and add the following two lines:

Code:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Save or copy the file to the root (home) directory of your site and you will be effectively invisible. Once you have completed your site and are ready for the world to see it, simply delete the robots.txt file or modify it to suit your needs (doing so is beyond the scope of this article) and you are ready to go live.

Further information: The Web Robots Pages

Going Live

The first thing I always suggest doing when launching a new site is signing up for the Webmaster Tools for both Bing and Google. This will give you insight into the way your site is being seen and indexed by the search engines that you will not be able to find anywhere else. Both are completely free and require only creating an account if you do not already have one, and then associating your site(s) with them. Statistics will take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks to show up once your site is indexed, but there are some things you should do in the interim.

At this point, you will want to create a sitemap so the search engines will understand the structure and layout of your site without having to guess at it. This is the quickest way to get the parts of your site indexed that you want to be seen. A sitemap is an XML file that represents your site in a simple, structured fashion. Here is a subset of our sitemap to serve as an example:

Code:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  <url>
    <loc>https://www.tentpitcher.com/</loc>
    <lastmod>2014-05-27</lastmod>
    <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
    <priority>1.0</priority>
  </url>
  <url>
    <loc>https://www.tentpitcher.com/blog</loc>
    <lastmod>2014-06-01</lastmod>
    <changefreq>daily</changefreq>
    <priority>0.9</priority>
  </url>
  <url>
    <loc>https://www.tentpitcher.com/xxxWords</loc>
    <lastmod>2014-06-01</lastmod>
    <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
    <priority>0.5</priority>
  </url>
</urlset>

This file is saved as sitemap.xml and just as with the robots.txt file, placed in the root (home) directory of your site. It outlines the different pages on your site (<loc>), when they were last modified (<lastmod>), how often they typically change (<changefreq>) and their priority relative to one another (<priority>). Once the file is in place, you should submit it using the Webmaster Tools. It is important to note that other sitemaps are treated mostly as guidelines when a site is being crawled, and while you can't really control much of anything about your listing or rank with them, they are essential to an effective overall site strategy. Make sure to keep your sitemap up to date so the search engines are aware of changes to your site as they happen.

Once you are setup with Webmaster Tools and have submitted your sitemap, it is really just a waiting game until your site begins appearing in results. I have found Google to do this much more quickly than Bing, which makes sense considering that Google actually indexes the web in real-time. Microsoft simply does not have the horsepower to pull that off, so Bing lags as a result. If you keep an eye on the Webmaster Tools dashboards, you will be able to see exactly when your site has been indexed in the Sitemaps section. There are two bits of information there - the number of URLs submitted, and the number of URLs indexed. If these numbers are not the same (like if submitted is 7 and indexed is 6), you should look into the reason for the discrepancy. Usually the cause is duplicate or invalid entries in sitemap.xml, or it could be an unreachable URL. In any case, errors here will not directly affect your rankings, but the underlying reasons for them can so they are worth addressing.

Further information: sitemaps.org - Home

Now What?

So you've launched your site, signed up for Webmaster Tools, created and submitted a sitemap, and confirmed that your site has at least been indexed by Google - what happens now? You should not make any changes to your site (other than adding new content) for the first month or so while the search engines decide where to start you off, this will make it easier for you to see if you have any problems that need to be addressed once your site begins appearing in the listings.

With Google, you will usually see an increase in your site's rank shortly after it is indexed. More often than not, it will then settle back down a bit. Assuming you have followed my advice and not changed anything on your site yet, don't worry as this is perfectly normal. It is basically Google's way of figuring out where your site belongs to start out with - keep in mind there are billions of sites and yours has to fit relevantly in there somewhere.

Bing is a bit different and seemingly more haphazard, your site will generally start out lower in the rankings, and then very slowly crawl one way or other without ever truly settling (at least early on). Therefore, it is impossible to infer anything without using Webmaster Tools to see how you are doing. Even then, it is difficult to get any truly useful information out of Microsoft until your site has been live for a while. It is for this and other reasons, that I usually recommend people solely focus on Google at this point and moving forward for a bit.

Once your site has stabilized, you should again check the Webmaster Tools. Both engines offer suggestions as part of the package that can help you pinpoint any issues that might be affecting your search engine rankings, and most of the things that appear will need to be addressed. However, there is a right way and a wrong way to update a live website, which will be the subject of the next installment.

Visibility is the key to managing your site's search engine rankings, and there are many third-party tools out there that can aid in the process. Two that I use regularly and have extensive experience with are AWStats and Webalizer. Of course, being able to install these depends on where your site is being hosted, but if you have the option I recommend installing one or the other.

Further information: http://www.webalizer.org/, http://awstats.sourceforge.net/

About Me

I have been on the technology side of this industry for several years, as well as involved in mainstream tech (including search) since the mid-nineties. I currently run an adult search engine called Tent Pitcher.

myjah · 06-05-2014, 03:58 PM

Thanks so much for participating - looking forward to part 2!

American Psycho · 06-05-2014, 05:01 PM

Nice that was good. Thx

carlosse · 06-06-2014, 11:55 AM

takeaway, make sure you have a robots.txt and sitemap.xml in place....why that much buzz for that...very amateur article most likely outsourced...xd

Lichen · 06-06-2014, 12:02 PM

>2014
>Launching new sites

KEK

Markul · 06-06-2014, 01:03 PM

That was very.... ermm... basic. It covers maybe 0,2% of the work involved in launching a new site / service. But thanks for sharing

xxxjay · 06-06-2014, 09:47 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Tent Pitcher

Part 1 - Launching a New Site

There is no point in reading any further if you don't have quality, original content. Sure, you can use shady SEO tricks, buy traffic, or re-post other people's content and maybe you'll make a few bucks doing it, but this series is about dealing with mainstream search engines - and they are constantly evolving to stay ahead of the cheats and shortcuts that you'll readily find on the internet. There are plenty of people who will sell you ways to increase your search engine rank, however, you will never be able to sustain it long term. If you truly want to build a brand in this crowded space, then you need to be on good terms with the two big players in search, and that means playing by their rules.

These days there are really only two mainstream search engines to be concerned with, Bing and Google. Targeting these guys also takes care of Yahoo and Ask.com as they are just mildly reformulated results from the other two respectively. Of course there are other mainstream search engines out there, but it is generally not worth the time to target them as decent rankings on Bing and Google will eventually land you there anyway. Plus, in terms of overall search traffic, you aren't looking at a lot of leads from their smaller counterparts.

Site Development

I recommend not "publishing" your site until you have the first iteration complete and ready for public consumption. While the definition of publishing your site varies depending on how you have it hosted, the idea is to prevent the search engines from noticing your site and associating the domain name with the unfinished content. The easiest way to do this is to use a robots.txt file to block the search engines from indexing your site while it is under development. Both Bing and Google have what are considered to be well-behaved spiders, meaning mainly that they will honor the contents of your robots.txt file and essentially ignore your site. To do this, create a file called robots.txt with any text editor and add the following two lines:

Code:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Save or copy the file to the root (home) directory of your site and you will be effectively invisible. Once you have completed your site and are ready for the world to see it, simply delete the robots.txt file or modify it to suit your needs (doing so is beyond the scope of this article) and you are ready to go live.

Further information: http://www.robotstxt.org/

Going Live

The first thing I always suggest doing when launching a new site is signing up for the Webmaster Tools for both Bing and Google. This will give you insight into the way your site is being seen and indexed by the search engines that you will not be able to find anywhere else. Both are completely free and require only creating an account if you do not already have one, and then associating your site(s) with them. Statistics will take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks to show up once your site is indexed, but there are some things you should do in the interim.

At this point, you will want to create a sitemap so the search engines will understand the structure and layout of your site without having to guess at it. This is the quickest way to get the parts of your site indexed that you want to be seen. A sitemap is an XML file that represents your site in a simple, structured fashion. Here is a subset of our sitemap to serve as an example:

Code:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  <url>
    <loc>https://www.tentpitcher.com/</loc>
    <lastmod>2014-05-27</lastmod>
    <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
    <priority>1.0</priority>
  </url>
  <url>
    <loc>https://www.tentpitcher.com/blog</loc>
    <lastmod>2014-06-01</lastmod>
    <changefreq>daily</changefreq>
    <priority>0.9</priority>
  </url>
  <url>
    <loc>https://www.tentpitcher.com/xxxWords</loc>
    <lastmod>2014-06-01</lastmod>
    <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
    <priority>0.5</priority>
  </url>
</urlset>

This file is saved as sitemap.xml and just as with the robots.txt file, placed in the root (home) directory of your site. It outlines the different pages on your site (<loc>), when they were last modified (<lastmod>), how often they typically change (<changefreq>) and their priority relative to one another (<priority>). Once the file is in place, you should submit it using the Webmaster Tools. It is important to note that other sitemaps are treated mostly as guidelines when a site is being crawled, and while you can't really control much of anything about your listing or rank with them, they are essential to an effective overall site strategy. Make sure to keep your sitemap up to date so the search engines are aware of changes to your site as they happen.

Once you are setup with Webmaster Tools and have submitted your sitemap, it is really just a waiting game until your site begins appearing in results. I have found Google to do this much more quickly than Bing, which makes sense considering that Google actually indexes the web in real-time. Microsoft simply does not have the horsepower to pull that off, so Bing lags as a result. If you keep an eye on the Webmaster Tools dashboards, you will be able to see exactly when your site has been indexed in the Sitemaps section. There are two bits of information there - the number of URLs submitted, and the number of URLs indexed. If these numbers are not the same (like if submitted is 7 and indexed is 6), you should look into the reason for the discrepancy. Usually the cause is duplicate or invalid entries in sitemap.xml, or it could be an unreachable URL. In any case, errors here will not directly affect your rankings, but the underlying reasons for them can so they are worth addressing.

Further information: http://www.sitemaps.org/

Now What?

So you've launched your site, signed up for Webmaster Tools, created and submitted a sitemap, and confirmed that your site has at least been indexed by Google - what happens now? You should not make any changes to your site (other than adding new content) for the first month or so while the search engines decide where to start you off, this will make it easier for you to see if you have any problems that need to be addressed once your site begins appearing in the listings.

With Google, you will usually see an increase in your site's rank shortly after it is indexed. More often than not, it will then settle back down a bit. Assuming you have followed my advice and not changed anything on your site yet, don't worry as this is perfectly normal. It is basically Google's way of figuring out where your site belongs to start out with - keep in mind there are billions of sites and yours has to fit relevantly in there somewhere.

Bing is a bit different and seemingly more haphazard, your site will generally start out lower in the rankings, and then very slowly crawl one way or other without ever truly settling (at least early on). Therefore, it is impossible to infer anything without using Webmaster Tools to see how you are doing. Even then, it is difficult to get any truly useful information out of Microsoft until your site has been live for a while. It is for this and other reasons, that I usually recommend people solely focus on Google at this point and moving forward for a bit.

Once your site has stabilized, you should again check the Webmaster Tools. Both engines offer suggestions as part of the package that can help you pinpoint any issues that might be affecting your search engine rankings, and most of the things that appear will need to be addressed. However, there is a right way and a wrong way to update a live website, which will be the subject of the next installment.

Visibility is the key to managing your site's search engine rankings, and there are many third-party tools out there that can aid in the process. Two that I use regularly and have extensive experience with are AWStats and Webalizer. Of course, being able to install these depends on where your site is being hosted, but if you have the option I recommend installing one or the other.

Further information: http://www.webalizer.org/, http://awstats.sourceforge.net/

About Me

I have been on the technology side of this industry for several years, as well as involved in mainstream tech (including search) since the mid-nineties. I currently run an adult search engine called Tent Pitcher.

Wow...a thread with info..what a concept...nice.

Cmalla90 · 07-03-2014, 09:05 PM

Thanks for the post, this has been very helpfully.

skirtcake · 07-16-2014, 09:23 AM

Much appreciated.

girlsclub · 07-22-2014, 07:35 PM

Thanks I just learned that you can shoo away the crawly bugs of google before launch =].

I am wondering about the shooting up and getting high rankings for a short time and then dying down. Does that mean that after say 6 months when google looks at your site again that you could be placed up in the high rankings potentially?

BOOBSARMY · 07-24-2014, 03:33 PM

Great info . Thanks

isexybody · 08-02-2014, 01:31 AM

I am a newbies. I need this knowledge, thank you for sharing

Karlstorm · 11-18-2014, 10:06 AM

Thanks for the information.

Erorina · 11-27-2014, 03:29 PM

thanks for nice explanation ;-)

roxanneraid · 12-10-2014, 04:38 PM

Great post, tnx mate

hotbarbie · 12-10-2014, 05:32 PM

thanks for your article

thecatwrites · 12-11-2014, 05:27 AM

Launching a new site really takes a lot of hard work. But still, great article.

horikh · 12-12-2014, 01:00 AM

Excellent post, thanks a lot !!

mihaitza · 12-12-2014, 01:00 AM

Thanks for super information!

zelca4ever · 12-12-2014, 01:00 AM

Nice insight, thanks for sharing!

valerynoir · 12-12-2014, 01:00 AM

thanks buddy

bella.franceska · 12-12-2014, 02:01 AM

thank you for sharing all this with us!

silviustr · 12-12-2014, 02:01 AM

great post man, thank you

miss.ralu · 12-12-2014, 02:14 AM

thank you for sharing all this with us!

parleal · 12-12-2014, 02:14 AM

Excellent post, thanks a lot !!

cinnemon · 12-12-2014, 03:00 AM

good info as always ....thanks!

aditeo · 12-12-2014, 03:00 AM

nice to know all these things

j3rkules · 08-16-2015, 03:54 PM

A short but productive advices for newbies.

babeshowwebsites · 08-21-2015, 12:32 PM

Thanks for sharing

rudimentalcom · 10-16-2015, 02:00 PM

Good info! Thank you!

MassTuber · 01-05-2016, 11:50 AM

Quite useful, thanks

j3rkules · 01-05-2016, 12:03 PM

Excellent article. Very well written and very informative.

xxxclusive · 01-22-2016, 10:08 AM

Thanks for sharing

Gandolph · 01-26-2016, 06:53 PM

Thanks for sharing

Tomxxx · 02-03-2016, 12:13 PM

thank you for this educational post Tent Pitcher! ;)

blogspot · 02-23-2016, 01:54 PM

Good Article for launching your own site

pornmovies.xxx · 12-02-2016, 02:49 AM

Thank God we have programmers that are doing all this work. It's a bit complicated!
Good read nevertheless!

ufotestpilot · 12-08-2016, 10:16 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Tent Pitcher

Part 1 - Launching a New Site

There is no point in reading any further if you don't have quality, original content. Sure, you can use shady SEO tricks, buy traffic, or re-post other people's content and maybe you'll make a few bucks doing it, but this series is about dealing with mainstream search engines - and they are constantly evolving to stay ahead of the cheats and shortcuts that you'll readily find on the internet. There are plenty of people who will sell you ways to increase your search engine rank, however, you will never be able to sustain it long term. If you truly want to build a brand in this crowded space, then you need to be on good terms with the two big players in search, and that means playing by their rules.

These days there are really only two mainstream search engines to be concerned with, Bing and Google. Targeting these guys also takes care of Yahoo and Ask.com as they are just mildly reformulated results from the other two respectively. Of course there are other mainstream search engines out there, but it is generally not worth the time to target them as decent rankings on Bing and Google will eventually land you there anyway. Plus, in terms of overall search traffic, you aren't looking at a lot of leads from their smaller counterparts.

Site Development

I recommend not "publishing" your site until you have the first iteration complete and ready for public consumption. While the definition of publishing your site varies depending on how you have it hosted, the idea is to prevent the search engines from noticing your site and associating the domain name with the unfinished content. The easiest way to do this is to use a robots.txt file to block the search engines from indexing your site while it is under development. Both Bing and Google have what are considered to be well-behaved spiders, meaning mainly that they will honor the contents of your robots.txt file and essentially ignore your site. To do this, create a file called robots.txt with any text editor and add the following two lines:

Code:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Save or copy the file to the root (home) directory of your site and you will be effectively invisible. Once you have completed your site and are ready for the world to see it, simply delete the robots.txt file or modify it to suit your needs (doing so is beyond the scope of this article) and you are ready to go live.

Further information: The Web Robots Pages

Going Live

The first thing I always suggest doing when launching a new site is signing up for the Webmaster Tools for both Bing and Google. This will give you insight into the way your site is being seen and indexed by the search engines that you will not be able to find anywhere else. Both are completely free and require only creating an account if you do not already have one, and then associating your site(s) with them. Statistics will take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks to show up once your site is indexed, but there are some things you should do in the interim.

At this point, you will want to create a sitemap so the search engines will understand the structure and layout of your site without having to guess at it. This is the quickest way to get the parts of your site indexed that you want to be seen. A sitemap is an XML file that represents your site in a simple, structured fashion. Here is a subset of our sitemap to serve as an example:

Code:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  <url>
    <loc>https://www.tentpitcher.com/</loc>
    <lastmod>2014-05-27</lastmod>
    <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
    <priority>1.0</priority>
  </url>
  <url>
    <loc>https://www.tentpitcher.com/blog</loc>
    <lastmod>2014-06-01</lastmod>
    <changefreq>daily</changefreq>
    <priority>0.9</priority>
  </url>
  <url>
    <loc>https://www.tentpitcher.com/xxxWords</loc>
    <lastmod>2014-06-01</lastmod>
    <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
    <priority>0.5</priority>
  </url>
</urlset>

This file is saved as sitemap.xml and just as with the robots.txt file, placed in the root (home) directory of your site. It outlines the different pages on your site (<loc>), when they were last modified (<lastmod>), how often they typically change (<changefreq>) and their priority relative to one another (<priority>). Once the file is in place, you should submit it using the Webmaster Tools. It is important to note that other sitemaps are treated mostly as guidelines when a site is being crawled, and while you can't really control much of anything about your listing or rank with them, they are essential to an effective overall site strategy. Make sure to keep your sitemap up to date so the search engines are aware of changes to your site as they happen.

Once you are setup with Webmaster Tools and have submitted your sitemap, it is really just a waiting game until your site begins appearing in results. I have found Google to do this much more quickly than Bing, which makes sense considering that Google actually indexes the web in real-time. Microsoft simply does not have the horsepower to pull that off, so Bing lags as a result. If you keep an eye on the Webmaster Tools dashboards, you will be able to see exactly when your site has been indexed in the Sitemaps section. There are two bits of information there - the number of URLs submitted, and the number of URLs indexed. If these numbers are not the same (like if submitted is 7 and indexed is 6), you should look into the reason for the discrepancy. Usually the cause is duplicate or invalid entries in sitemap.xml, or it could be an unreachable URL. In any case, errors here will not directly affect your rankings, but the underlying reasons for them can so they are worth addressing.

Further information: sitemaps.org - Home

Now What?

So you've launched your site, signed up for Webmaster Tools, created and submitted a sitemap, and confirmed that your site has at least been indexed by Google - what happens now? You should not make any changes to your site (other than adding new content) for the first month or so while the search engines decide where to start you off, this will make it easier for you to see if you have any problems that need to be addressed once your site begins appearing in the listings.

With Google, you will usually see an increase in your site's rank shortly after it is indexed. More often than not, it will then settle back down a bit. Assuming you have followed my advice and not changed anything on your site yet, don't worry as this is perfectly normal. It is basically Google's way of figuring out where your site belongs to start out with - keep in mind there are billions of sites and yours has to fit relevantly in there somewhere.

Bing is a bit different and seemingly more haphazard, your site will generally start out lower in the rankings, and then very slowly crawl one way or other without ever truly settling (at least early on). Therefore, it is impossible to infer anything without using Webmaster Tools to see how you are doing. Even then, it is difficult to get any truly useful information out of Microsoft until your site has been live for a while. It is for this and other reasons, that I usually recommend people solely focus on Google at this point and moving forward for a bit.

Once your site has stabilized, you should again check the Webmaster Tools. Both engines offer suggestions as part of the package that can help you pinpoint any issues that might be affecting your search engine rankings, and most of the things that appear will need to be addressed. However, there is a right way and a wrong way to update a live website, which will be the subject of the next installment.

Visibility is the key to managing your site's search engine rankings, and there are many third-party tools out there that can aid in the process. Two that I use regularly and have extensive experience with are AWStats and Webalizer. Of course, being able to install these depends on where your site is being hosted, but if you have the option I recommend installing one or the other.

Further information: http://www.webalizer.org/, http://awstats.sourceforge.net/

About Me

I have been on the technology side of this industry for several years, as well as involved in mainstream tech (including search) since the mid-nineties. I currently run an adult search engine called Tent Pitcher.

Great article! I know it takes a lot of time and effort for you guys to write these tutorials and I for one appreciate it. Don't think you're wasting your time. It's a great help for many of us.
Keep up the good work!

Daniel BongaCash · 12-22-2016, 01:47 AM

Thanks for sharing

tigercat · 12-22-2016, 10:56 AM

Excellent , thanks for this

j3rkules · 12-22-2016, 11:19 AM

I just want to tell that if you are new to the adult industry and want to create an adult site, you can visit my site mradultaffiliate.com for some free information.

alice_cokerat · 02-10-2017, 08:32 AM

Quite usefull, thank you sir!

alice_cokerat · 02-10-2017, 08:34 AM

This is really good stuff. I am a new to this.

celandina · 02-10-2017, 10:27 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Markul

That was very.... ermm... basic. It covers maybe 0,2% of the work involved in launching a new site / service. But thanks for sharing

Shit ??!! 0.2 % ??? I have a recent site ( Nov 2016 launch) and just now found out that I am not up to the 0.2 %.....i just found out about registering and site maps...what is the other 99.8 % I am still missing.... Oh somebody said I need H1 tags... WTF is that ?? This will be a looooooong tutorial :U

I need to hire somebody ....

Nicolas-Pornsensuality · 03-17-2017, 06:41 AM

Thank you

Olga BongaCash · 03-31-2017, 08:02 AM

thank you for the info!

Sasha BongaCash · 03-31-2017, 10:11 AM

Thanks for sharing! It's useful

n3o · 04-03-2017, 07:49 PM

great information , lookin' forward for part 2

fairytail · 05-15-2017, 08:16 AM

Thanks for Info!!

jizz.st · 06-05-2017, 11:20 PM

Excellent and simple...wish i had read this before i started. Luckily i followed 90% of this format anyway.

06-03-2014, 03:02 PM	#1
Tent Pitcher Confirmed User Industry Role: Join Date: Nov 2012 Location: New Orleans Posts: 213	Launching a New Site Part 1 - Launching a New Site There is no point in reading any further if you don't have quality, original content. Sure, you can use shady SEO tricks, buy traffic, or re-post other people's content and maybe you'll make a few bucks doing it, but this series is about dealing with mainstream search engines - and they are constantly evolving to stay ahead of the cheats and shortcuts that you'll readily find on the internet. There are plenty of people who will sell you ways to increase your search engine rank, however, you will never be able to sustain it long term. If you truly want to build a brand in this crowded space, then you need to be on good terms with the two big players in search, and that means playing by their rules. These days there are really only two mainstream search engines to be concerned with, Bing and Google. Targeting these guys also takes care of Yahoo and Ask.com as they are just mildly reformulated results from the other two respectively. Of course there are other mainstream search engines out there, but it is generally not worth the time to target them as decent rankings on Bing and Google will eventually land you there anyway. Plus, in terms of overall search traffic, you aren't looking at a lot of leads from their smaller counterparts. Site Development I recommend not "publishing" your site until you have the first iteration complete and ready for public consumption. While the definition of publishing your site varies depending on how you have it hosted, the idea is to prevent the search engines from noticing your site and associating the domain name with the unfinished content. The easiest way to do this is to use a robots.txt file to block the search engines from indexing your site while it is under development. Both Bing and Google have what are considered to be well-behaved spiders, meaning mainly that they will honor the contents of your robots.txt file and essentially ignore your site. To do this, create a file called robots.txt with any text editor and add the following two lines: Code: User-agent: * Disallow: / Save or copy the file to the root (home) directory of your site and you will be effectively invisible. Once you have completed your site and are ready for the world to see it, simply delete the robots.txt file or modify it to suit your needs (doing so is beyond the scope of this article) and you are ready to go live. Further information: The Web Robots Pages Going Live The first thing I always suggest doing when launching a new site is signing up for the Webmaster Tools for both Bing and Google. This will give you insight into the way your site is being seen and indexed by the search engines that you will not be able to find anywhere else. Both are completely free and require only creating an account if you do not already have one, and then associating your site(s) with them. Statistics will take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks to show up once your site is indexed, but there are some things you should do in the interim. At this point, you will want to create a sitemap so the search engines will understand the structure and layout of your site without having to guess at it. This is the quickest way to get the parts of your site indexed that you want to be seen. A sitemap is an XML file that represents your site in a simple, structured fashion. Here is a subset of our sitemap to serve as an example: Code: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"> <url> <loc>https://www.tentpitcher.com/</loc> <lastmod>2014-05-27</lastmod> <changefreq>monthly</changefreq> <priority>1.0</priority> </url> <url> <loc>https://www.tentpitcher.com/blog</loc> <lastmod>2014-06-01</lastmod> <changefreq>daily</changefreq> <priority>0.9</priority> </url> <url> <loc>https://www.tentpitcher.com/xxxWords</loc> <lastmod>2014-06-01</lastmod> <changefreq>weekly</changefreq> <priority>0.5</priority> </url> </urlset> This file is saved as sitemap.xml and just as with the robots.txt file, placed in the root (home) directory of your site. It outlines the different pages on your site (<loc>), when they were last modified (<lastmod>), how often they typically change (<changefreq>) and their priority relative to one another (<priority>). Once the file is in place, you should submit it using the Webmaster Tools. It is important to note that other sitemaps are treated mostly as guidelines when a site is being crawled, and while you can't really control much of anything about your listing or rank with them, they are essential to an effective overall site strategy. Make sure to keep your sitemap up to date so the search engines are aware of changes to your site as they happen. Once you are setup with Webmaster Tools and have submitted your sitemap, it is really just a waiting game until your site begins appearing in results. I have found Google to do this much more quickly than Bing, which makes sense considering that Google actually indexes the web in real-time. Microsoft simply does not have the horsepower to pull that off, so Bing lags as a result. If you keep an eye on the Webmaster Tools dashboards, you will be able to see exactly when your site has been indexed in the Sitemaps section. There are two bits of information there - the number of URLs submitted, and the number of URLs indexed. If these numbers are not the same (like if submitted is 7 and indexed is 6), you should look into the reason for the discrepancy. Usually the cause is duplicate or invalid entries in sitemap.xml, or it could be an unreachable URL. In any case, errors here will not directly affect your rankings, but the underlying reasons for them can so they are worth addressing. Further information: sitemaps.org - Home Now What? So you've launched your site, signed up for Webmaster Tools, created and submitted a sitemap, and confirmed that your site has at least been indexed by Google - what happens now? You should not make any changes to your site (other than adding new content) for the first month or so while the search engines decide where to start you off, this will make it easier for you to see if you have any problems that need to be addressed once your site begins appearing in the listings. With Google, you will usually see an increase in your site's rank shortly after it is indexed. More often than not, it will then settle back down a bit. Assuming you have followed my advice and not changed anything on your site yet, don't worry as this is perfectly normal. It is basically Google's way of figuring out where your site belongs to start out with - keep in mind there are billions of sites and yours has to fit relevantly in there somewhere. Bing is a bit different and seemingly more haphazard, your site will generally start out lower in the rankings, and then very slowly crawl one way or other without ever truly settling (at least early on). Therefore, it is impossible to infer anything without using Webmaster Tools to see how you are doing. Even then, it is difficult to get any truly useful information out of Microsoft until your site has been live for a while. It is for this and other reasons, that I usually recommend people solely focus on Google at this point and moving forward for a bit. Once your site has stabilized, you should again check the Webmaster Tools. Both engines offer suggestions as part of the package that can help you pinpoint any issues that might be affecting your search engine rankings, and most of the things that appear will need to be addressed. However, there is a right way and a wrong way to update a live website, which will be the subject of the next installment. Visibility is the key to managing your site's search engine rankings, and there are many third-party tools out there that can aid in the process. Two that I use regularly and have extensive experience with are AWStats and Webalizer. Of course, being able to install these depends on where your site is being hosted, but if you have the option I recommend installing one or the other. Further information: http://www.webalizer.org/, http://awstats.sourceforge.net/ About Me I have been on the technology side of this industry for several years, as well as involved in mainstream tech (including search) since the mid-nineties. I currently run an adult search engine called Tent Pitcher. __________________ Tent Pitcher - Adult Search Engine

06-05-2014, 03:58 PM	#2
myjah Back in the harbor Industry Role: Join Date: Sep 2003 Posts: 11,482	Thanks so much for participating - looking forward to part 2! __________________ VP of Marketing AVN Media Network Skype: AVNJill [email protected]

06-06-2014, 11:55 AM	#4
carlosse Registered User Industry Role: Join Date: Jan 2014 Posts: 26	takeaway, make sure you have a robots.txt and sitemap.xml in place....why that much buzz for that...very amateur article most likely outsourced...xd __________________ ICQ Number----------->686426610 Optimized and Google Friendly WP Adult Themes here https://adult-theme.com

06-06-2014, 01:03 PM	#6
Markul Likes Pie Industry Role: Join Date: Dec 2007 Location: The land that liberated porn Posts: 12,400	That was very.... ermm... basic. It covers maybe 0,2% of the work involved in launching a new site / service. But thanks for sharing __________________ Get 5% for life on Model Earnings and Fan token buys with AdultNode.com - Studio Link - Creators keep 100% of your earnings

07-03-2014, 09:05 PM	#8
Cmalla90 Registered User Industry Role: Join Date: May 2014 Posts: 10	Lauching a new site Thanks for the post, this has been very helpfully.

06-05-2014, 05:01 PM	#3
American Psycho Confirmed User Industry Role: Join Date: Feb 2009 Posts: 3,068	Nice that was good. Thx

06-06-2014, 12:02 PM	#5
Lichen Tube Master Industry Role: Join Date: May 2004 Posts: 1,639	>2014 >Launching new sites KEK

07-16-2014, 09:23 AM	#9
skirtcake Registered User Industry Role: Join Date: Jul 2014 Location: SLC Posts: 95	Much appreciated.

07-22-2014, 07:35 PM	#10
girlsclub Registered User Industry Role: Join Date: Jul 2014 Posts: 1	Thanks I just learned that you can shoo away the crawly bugs of google before launch =]. I am wondering about the shooting up and getting high rankings for a short time and then dying down. Does that mean that after say 6 months when google looks at your site again that you could be placed up in the high rankings potentially? __________________ http://jav4u.co/ - JAV Porn Movies

07-24-2014, 03:33 PM	#11
BOOBSARMY Confirmed User Industry Role: Join Date: Jul 2014 Posts: 115	Great info . Thanks

08-02-2014, 01:31 AM	#12
isexybody Registered User Industry Role: Join Date: Jul 2014 Posts: 51	I am a newbies. I need this knowledge, thank you for sharing

11-18-2014, 10:06 AM	#13
Karlstorm Registered User Industry Role: Join Date: Mar 2014 Posts: 46	Thanks for the information.

11-27-2014, 03:29 PM	#14
Erorina Registered User Industry Role: Join Date: Nov 2014 Posts: 33	thanks for nice explanation ;-)

12-10-2014, 04:38 PM	#15
roxanneraid Registered User Industry Role: Join Date: Dec 2014 Posts: 35	Great post, tnx mate

12-10-2014, 05:32 PM	#16
hotbarbie Registered User Industry Role: Join Date: Dec 2014 Posts: 32	thanks for your article

12-11-2014, 05:27 AM	#17
thecatwrites Confirmed User Industry Role: Join Date: Dec 2014 Posts: 418	Launching a new site really takes a lot of hard work. But still, great article.

12-12-2014, 01:00 AM	#18
horikh Registered User Industry Role: Join Date: Dec 2014 Posts: 33	Excellent post, thanks a lot !!

12-12-2014, 01:00 AM	#19
mihaitza Registered User Industry Role: Join Date: Dec 2014 Posts: 30	Thanks for super information!

12-12-2014, 01:00 AM	#20
zelca4ever Registered User Industry Role: Join Date: Dec 2014 Posts: 31	Nice insight, thanks for sharing!

12-12-2014, 01:00 AM	#21
valerynoir Registered User Industry Role: Join Date: Dec 2014 Posts: 32	thanks buddy

12-12-2014, 02:01 AM	#22
bella.franceska Registered User Industry Role: Join Date: Dec 2014 Posts: 30	thank you for sharing all this with us!

12-12-2014, 02:01 AM	#23
silviustr Registered User Industry Role: Join Date: Dec 2014 Posts: 30	great post man, thank you

12-12-2014, 02:14 AM	#24
miss.ralu Registered User Industry Role: Join Date: Dec 2014 Posts: 30	thank you for sharing all this with us!

12-12-2014, 02:14 AM	#25
parleal Registered User Industry Role: Join Date: Dec 2014 Posts: 30	Excellent post, thanks a lot !!

12-12-2014, 03:00 AM	#26
cinnemon Registered User Industry Role: Join Date: Dec 2014 Posts: 32	good info as always ....thanks!

12-12-2014, 03:00 AM	#27
aditeo Registered User Industry Role: Join Date: Dec 2014 Posts: 31	nice to know all these things

08-16-2015, 03:54 PM	#28
j3rkules VIP Industry Role: Join Date: Jul 2013 Posts: 22,105	A short but productive advices for newbies. __________________ How To Build A Porn Site And Make Money \| My Best $$$ Cam Sponsor 3 Top Adult Hosting Providers

08-21-2015, 12:32 PM	#29
babeshowwebsites Registered User Industry Role: Join Date: Jan 2015 Posts: 99	Thanks for sharing

10-16-2015, 02:00 PM	#30
rudimentalcom Registered User Industry Role: Join Date: Feb 2015 Posts: 33	Good info! Thank you!

01-05-2016, 11:50 AM	#31
MassTuber Registered User Industry Role: Join Date: Sep 2014 Posts: 33	Quite useful, thanks

01-05-2016, 12:03 PM	#32
j3rkules VIP Industry Role: Join Date: Jul 2013 Posts: 22,105	Excellent article. Very well written and very informative. __________________ How To Build A Porn Site And Make Money \| My Best $$$ Cam Sponsor 3 Top Adult Hosting Providers

01-22-2016, 10:08 AM	#33
xxxclusive Confirmed User Industry Role: Join Date: Oct 2012 Posts: 548	Thanks for sharing

01-26-2016, 06:53 PM	#34
Gandolph Confirmed User Industry Role: Join Date: Nov 2015 Location: USA Posts: 180	Interesting Thanks for sharing

02-03-2016, 12:13 PM	#35
Tomxxx Registered User Industry Role: Join Date: Jan 2015 Location: Zagreb, Croatia Posts: 88	thank you for this educational post Tent Pitcher! ;)

02-23-2016, 01:54 PM	#36
blogspot So Fucking Banned Industry Role: Join Date: Jan 2016 Posts: 292	Good Article for launching your own site