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Knowledge Base > Auction How-Tos > How Your Auction URL Appears on Search Engines
Our platform gives you the option to add words to your auction’s URL, or “Uniform Resource Locator.” SEO best practices generally recommend using keywords in a URL, however, your event will be live for so little time that it won’t negatively impact your event if only numbers appear there. Read on to learn more about how search engines find and then “forget” new and retired URLs.
Given that your auction will be live for a short time, getting your URL to appear on search engines to coincide with your auction’s “live dates” can be disappointing, if not impossible—the same thing when you want your URL to stop appearing in search results. Unfortunately, search doesn’t start and stop on demand. It is a process, and you have to accept the timing of the search engines. CharityAuctionsToday has no control over what appears on search engine result pages. A customizable URL will be assigned to your site as you design your auction. You can customize it to reflect your organization, which can be done any time before your auction begins. Please note the sooner you customize it, the sooner it will appear on search engines. The URL automatically generated for you is https://go.charityauctionstoday.com/bid/, and you must add your customization after the forward slash, like this: https://go.charityauctionstoday.com/bid/customizationgoeshere.
You can also use your domain purchased from a domain broker such as GoDaddy. Here are the directions for forwarding your domain to use on your auction.
Remember, as mentioned before, search doesn’t start and stop on demand. It is a process. And that process is called indexing.
You’ve probably heard of spiders in reference to the internet. It’s important to understand that search engines use “spiders” to crawl the web. These spiders (computer code) look for what’s new on the web and determine what it’s about. They do this through complex algorithms, and this is called indexing.
Spiders are smart and look for overall user experience and intentions behind a user’s search, called “user intent.” This means that search engines will look for the closest to perfect match between the user’s intent and the user experience on a website. You probably remember from Econ 101 that “Indexing” is a statistical indicator, which is why pages are sorted by their content to create an index. When a search query is made, search engines rank the results based on over 200 factors, of which fresh content, site, page quality, and user context hold a lot of weight to provide the best possible results for that user and that query.
According to Google, getting your site indexed (on search engines) can take about an hour to several weeks. Unfortunately, there is no hard and fast rule like Lenscrafters has, “Glasses in about an hour.” So you just have to live with the ambiguity and hope for the best! Fortunately, our primo developers have created your auction site in a manner that makes Google happy, so you’re already in favor of the master indexer before your site is indexed. And that is good news for your URL’s search visibility.
You rely on SEO (search engine optimization) to help interested bidders find your auction site. But how can you perform SEO if you don’t know when your site will be indexed? When will it be indexed? Given that you can’t predict when your auction site will be indexed, you should create your customized URL immediately to give it a head start. Hopefully, by the time your site is finished, it will be indexed.
As mentioned earlier, when the auction ends and the site is removed from the web, it will take time to stop appearing in searches. Unfortunately, there is no way you can remove it earlier or keep it from being delivered in search queries. This is why getting your domain forwarded to your auction is an ideal strategy for those who have auctions yearly or more. Your domain is established, and more than likely, it will speed up the indexing issue, as the spiders will detect “fresh content” and index it quicker than a newly introduced website.
Due to the uncertainty of when your site will appear in search queries, most auction admins use their URLs on flyers, social media, websites, email signatures, blogs, etc., once the site is live. This way, they don’t have to wait for indexing as they are directing traffic to your site, not relying on a search engine for traffic.
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