How does Google or Bing Recognise my Blog?

[AshShep1]

I have a blog as part of my site http://www.over50choices.co.uk/Community/Ashleys-Blog.aspx and has been live for approx 10 weeks, but i dont think google recognises is yet as a Blog.

Is there anything that i can do to speed this up?

We have posted about 25 posts.

Thanks
Ash

[TomRayner]

Hi there Ash

On the contrary, I think Google and Bing are recognising the blog and indexing it well.

With this site search, you can see over 89 URLs indexed - it looks as though Google is indexing the blog posts and the categories just fine.

What were you expecting to see from this?  If there was something specific, I can try and see if it's being achieved.

As a couple of general points, it's a good idea to link some of your blog posts to other internal pages on your site, for example linking the words "funeral plans" in your blog posts to your funeral plans page.  That means that if this page gains links/social shares, the SEO "strength" will pass through that blog post to your key landing pages.

As an aside, the URL structure looks pretty long.  With the postID and number subfolders, your blog posts are 5 subfolders deep.  Sometimes this can be a bit of a barrier for Google and Bing to index your page, although as said before that doesn't look to be a problem.  If at all possible, ask your developer to remove those two subfolders - 3 folders deep is usually the recommended site structure.  This isn't that essential, however.

[AshShep1]

HI Tom thanks for getting back to me.

I was prompted to ask the question because we have google alerts set up for our keywords eg funeral plans and we never show on the list of daily Blogs for these words?

Do they need to be "anchored or in the title" to show or should google just pick them up?

Ash

[AshShep1]

Oh and meant to ask, do you mean the sub folders PostId & 77 in the example below?

http://www.over50choices.co.uk/Community/Ashleys-Blog/PostId/77/scratching-your-head-over-life-insurance.aspx

Ash

[TomRayner]

Hi there Ash

Yep, those are the two folders where, if possible, you might want to omit.  Of course, make sure that any old URLs are removed from the site navigation, sitemaps and 301 one them if applicable.  It's not really that essential of a change, but widely seen as good practice.

As for your alerts question, I'm afraid I can't help much there although I do know that Google Alerts can be pretty unreliable at the best of times.

[AshShep1]

Thanks Tom

Ash