For quite a while, I found that Google wasn’t indexing my site properly. From the logs, it appeared that the Googlebot would come by, read my robots.txt, and my index.html, and then nothing else. I couldn’t figure out why, my robots.txt was properly formatted as far as I could tell.

Did some reading, and found out that Google has created a lovely little Catch-22: your site won’t be indexed unless somebody already in the index links to it. So, who exactly is going to link to my site, if nobody knows it’s there? I’m not asking for a great PageRank or anything, but c’mon! At least put me in the index!

I told my coworker Matthias about this at a BBQ on Saturday. Next day, he linked to my site. I was already mentioned on his page, because of our potato cannon work. Now he knows that I have a site of my own.

Matthias’ site is fairly popular, having been Slashdotted a few times already. I have already seen an increase in the traffic coming to my own site. Plus I’m finally in the Google index, so searches like “Craigmatron” will find me.

So, thanks Matt!