The timeline goes something like this.
12:30am – Published blog entry “Why I Chose Online Education“. As a recent article, the entry now leads off my homepage and has a permanent page to live on.
12:33am – Updated XML sitemap to reflect new page and pinged Google about the update.
12:57am – New blog entry “Why I Chose Online Education” and updated homepage content appear in Google searches restricted to Digitalsapien.com pages. My search query was site:www.digitalsapien.com online education. Now that’s fast for just indexing the new page … but what about ranking alongside other sites?
1:19am – Shocked to discovered Google ranks my entry 138th out of 1,640,000 listings for the phrase ellis college online education. Click here to view a screenshot of Google rankings for online education ellis college. (If the image appears small just click to enlarge it)
Now that’s pretty damn fast. It’s one more reason why every site should be using an XML sitemap and pointing Google and Yahoo toward it. So all you webmasters out there, go to Google Webmaster Tools register, and set up your website feed.