Wednesday 18 October 2006

Creating a Google Sitemap

OK, I admit this is more technogeek than personal finance, but as lots of pfblog.org blogs appear to be hosted by blogger.com I thought this might be useful to some readers.

Basically, you can register your website (xxx.blogspot.com) with the google Webmaster Tools sitemap service. This will give you useful info about when your site was last spidered, how many pages have been indexed etc. One option is to provide a SITEMAP listing all your pages. This may help with getting all your pages indexed by google asap, and therefore increase your traffic/readership.

While searching for how to save a sitemap.txt file onto my blogspot.com site, I found out that if you have your blog setup to provide atom RSS feeds AND you're using the "old" blogger.com (not the BETA version), then you can simply specify your atom feed as the sitemap file! ie. enter the sitemap URL as http://yourblog.blogspot.com/atom.xml

This ensures all my recent post permlink URLs are being indexed by google after they were published. Before I set up this sitemap URL Google had last spidered my site 9 days previously and had indexed 29 pages. After setting up the atom.xml page as the sitemap file, Google had reindexed my site and found 37 pages.

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