How long does it take for an article or a page to be listed by google

[ClaireH-184886]

Hi, my question is a two parter. I think i must be doing something wrong.

With my site map, it is set to show different section of my site while on my old site the site map listed every single article - i am not sure if setting it to each section is correct, can someone please advise me on this.

The second part of the question is, how long does it take for an article to be listed by google.

This article on my site was written today http://www.in2town.co.uk/lifestyle/holidaymakers-ignore-the-importance-of-travel-insurance-according-to-survey

Holidaymakers Ignore The Importance of Travel Insurance According To Survey

but when i check to see if google has listed the article yet by putting in the whole title, it does not come up, i even added the website name at the end and still it did not come up.

This is worrying me a bit as a lot of my articles are news stories which means they are current articles so if google is not picking them up then no one else will be.

can anyone let me know what i should be doing so google picks them up quicker please.

[AlanMosley]

If you add new conetnt every day, you will start to get crawled every day.

[ClaireH-184886]

the huge problem i have is getting the news pages picked up straight away, this has been a big headache of mine. there is no point in a news page being read in two days when it is old news.

I need to find a way to promote the latest news on my site and get it picked up by google

[AlanMosley]

Bing's duane forrester said that you should not list every page, but the imporatant pages, but when i asked him about this he said that for a small site it is ok to list every page.

A site maop does not mean that your the pages it luist will be indexed, nor does it mean pages that are not included wont be indexed. It is a chance to giove the SE some info about the pages. liek change freqency, last modified, priority and such. It is also a signal of the canonical version of a page.

It is also worth noting that Bing will ignore a sitemap if it is not honest, if you put updated daily but dont do so, they will lose trust in it.

As for how long it takles to get listed, anywhere up to a month in most cases. In bing webmster tools you can place it directly into the index and will be in results shoprtly after, you can do the same in GWMT but using the instant previews or fetch as googlebot (I cant rember which) I have been told.

[AlanBleiweiss]

I'm not a Joomla expert - so you're best bet is to check with someone who is, however there are Joomla extensions you can use to automate the generation of your sitemap so you don't have to manually do it every time.

Which one you use is something I'm not prepared to recommend because I am not up to speed enough on Joomla.

[ClaireH-184886]

hi alan, this is great. can you explain more. i use joomla, so not sure how to really set the site map.

this is the site map i am using

http://www.in2town.co.uk/sitemap-xml?sitemap=1

can you explain what i need to do to make sure that all articles are included and should i put the sitemap on my site or leave it in googlewebmaster

[AlanBleiweiss]

Diane,

a sitemap.xml file should include links to every page on the site you want indexed.  While Google and Bing are fairly good at discovering content, this helps ensure they find pages sooner than their crawler might get around to discovering them. (unless you have a site with more than 10,000 URLS - at which point you should consider splitting sitemap files into multiple files and including a separate sitemap index file that you then submit. )

That then leads to the next question - how often? Every site is different and crawled at a different frequency based on Google's assessment of how often it should happen as well as factoring in that their system can only crawl so many pages on any given day.

That alone is reason to include all your content in sitemap files - and automatically ping search engines each time the sitemap file is updated.

If you have enough "news quality" content, look into a separate news sitemap file as well.  With the right footwork and leverage, you can then see if your news specific content can be indexed even faster, and included in the Google news system as  well.