I’ve been using the Google Webmaster Tools for the past two years. I’ve registered all of my sites, submitted sitemaps, and gone through the site verification process.  To be honest I don’t know if the tools have actually helped with anything, but at least I feel like I’ve done everything I can to get Google to know about my sites.  Some of my sites, however, still do not have any pages in the Google index. I’m not sure why this is, but I suspect that they got "banned" by Google.  You see, my early days of web work was a bit on the "black" side of things. My goal was to try and make a quick buck.  I built some web site generation tools and quickly got about 50 sites up and running, each with about 150-300 pages.  Of course the content was mostly crap and was being pulled from other sites.  The process "worked" - I got indexed pretty fast, got some traffic, and started making money with Adsense clicks.  Eventually, however, the traffic stopped and my sites weren’t indexed by Google. 

I have since seen the light and am focusing on create REAL web sites.  So, I’ve asked Google to forgive me and include my sites in their index.  I find the whole thing a bit irritating.  I understand Google wants their search results to be "relevant" and all, but their actions just seem a bit Big Brother to me.

While Google is still a necessary evil, I did discover the Yahoo Site Explorer site this morning. It has some similarities to the Google webmaster tools site.  You can register your sites, submit a sitemap, and there is also a verification process so they make sure you actually own (or at least have file-level access to) the site.  It does require you to have a Yahoo account, but that’s free so no big deal.

I suspect it will take a few weeks before I can tell if submitting my sites using the Yahoo Site Explorer has any impact on my site indexing and traffic. I’m sure it won’t hurt, so it was worth the 10 minutes of effort involved.  I’ll let you know what I discover.

This is a bit off topic.  Okay, completely off topic; but I’m just really pissed right now. This is one of those times where I wish I had an Apple computer, phone, and anything other than Microsoft. 

I re-imaged by laptop a few weeks ago with our company’s official image for Vista. It was a pain to do it, but I was having some issues with my laptop and figured I would be better off with the supported image.  A few minutes ago I finally decided to hook my T-Mobile Dash (running Windows Mobile 6) up to my laptop so I could sync some files and music for an upcoming trip.  So I plug my phone into my laptop and guess what happened?  NOTHING! Absolutely nothing happened. No "hey I found a new device" or "yes, I see you plugged in a Windows Mobile device".  Not a damn thing happened.  Vista just kept doing its own thing, Windows Mobile did it’s own thing, and I cursed the beast in Redmond for a good 10 minutes.

Wouldn’t you think that hooking up two devices running the latest Microsoft operating systems would just work? I mean seriously, this had to be something they tested right? I’m sure there’s some "reasonable" explanation. Some stupid security setting or driver setting or something that is out of whack.  But that still doesn’t make me feel good.