I need to get links to some of my publications,
which I have as PDF files, on the internet
so that folks searching on the key
topic-words will find them and be
able to link to them.
I’ve created a google page with links to the
PDFs on it. Jim Stone, philosophy and music.
I’ve clicked ‘publish,’ however the web page
doesn’t com up in a google search.
The URL is jstone44.googlepages.com.
If you go for that you get the page,
otherwise not.
Does anybody know how to make this thing work?
I don’t know how to ask google, especially as there
seems no way to talk to a human being.
Also, I have friends with pages up and running.
If I post my PDFs to them and they link to
them on their page, will these articles
come up in google searches on the
key-word topics?
There are robot programs that regularly “crawl” through the internet, identifying new web sites, the names of pages, the names of files, the images, etc. and update the search engines such as Google. Once one search engine knows about you, the other search engines get updated soon after. It may take a few days.
I can see your pdf files, but when I try to open them, Adobe says they are broken and can’t be fixed. When I view the source code for your page, I do not see a closing to terminate the file links. Are you using some sort of Google-provided tool to build this page? Are you using it correctly? Did you miss a step?
A friend of mine was doing this a short while ago. When you submit a page to a search engine, it takes a while. Google takes four to six weeks, and it’s similar for most of the others. Just sit tight and wait. If you can persuade someone to embed links to your webpage on their webpage (maybe on a reciprocal basis) you are more likely to appear nearer the start of the search results.
Edited to say:
There are search-engines that will get you logged quicker, but they want paid.
Jim, i tried to post this earlier, but got my windows in a bunch and lost it…
One of the things you can do to boost the chances of your stie coming up is to do searches on sets of terms that should definitely bring your pages up. I did a search for “Jim Stone philosophy and music” and it did not come up… yet. Several other pages that refer to you are there, but not your page.
How long have you had the page up? Like the others have said, it takes time.
I’m not sure how it works with PDF files, but I know that putting a good set of Meta tags in your main page code helps too. Also, if you get a link up on related pages and those of friends and peers, it will aid in the faster recognition of the content by the search engines.
If the page is new you have to wait for the robot to crawl your site. It will only find your page if another page anywhere on the web already links to it, or if you submit your page for indexing.
Google provides information on how to submit your site for indexing. Make sure that whatever page you submit to Google (you will probably actually submit to something called DMOZ) contains:
a) real text inside the links, not just pictures of text
b) valid HTML (broken links won’t allow the crawler to find your stuff
c) the links are real, not generated by javascript
Then sit back and wait a couple weeks. You still may not rank high in the results.
Wait until the machines start conversing on forums like this. Maybe they already are. I’m sure some grad students have already mined the topic as a computer programming project. The idea can get real creepy, especially if a live human stumbles onto a forum dominated by machine participants, with each programmer believing their machine is the only automaton on the forum.
Firstly, it might be easier to get your content indexed if it was in ordinary HTML marked-up text. Google can crawl and index PDF content, but I have known instances where certain PDFs have given them problems.
If you are sure that your PDFs are in good shape, then don’t bother submitting to Google. Getting direct links from pages that are already indexed is the best way to get indexed and ranked in Google.
Also, to get a good showing in the search result pages can be difficult and can take a lot of work (enough to keep me in a day job, at any rate). If you can email the PDF URLs to any friends who have websites and ask them to link to them, that’ll be time well spent.
If it were me, I’d do it a wee bit differently. I’d put the content up as HTML pages for the search engines, and then have links on those HTML pages for people who wanted to download the PDFs. I’d then get my friends to link to the HTML pages instead of the PDFs. I’d also block the PDFs in the site’s robots.txt file, just to completely eliminate the tiny (almost negligible) risk of duplicate content issues. This would mean that Google would only index the HTML version, although the PDFs would still be available to visitors.
Google is happiest when it only finds one version of each piece of content and currently HTML/text is still its favourite flavour.