Google Sitemaps and Blogger blogs
In a previous posts I suggested joining the new Google sitemaps initiative and posted a no-nonsense tutorial on getting up and running with the program.
I immediately started pondering what to do with my own blog, which currently is still hosted by Blogger and not in my own webspace. This of course makes it impossible to create a sitemap using the sitemap_gen.py script.
Someone suggested submitting the atom.xml feed, intended for content syndication, to the program. Google sitemaps’ help section clearly states that RSS feeds and Atom 0.3 feeds are acceptable formats.
So I did and the feed was accepted and given “ATOM FEED” status.
Still find it a little hard to believe that “that’s it” but wait and see…
Keywords: sitemaps, google sitemaps
posted by Gert @ 2:47 PM
2 comments
2 Comments:
I've created a hack over here
http://www.stephennewton.com/2005/06/google-sitemap-for-blogger.html that outputs sitemaps for Blogger users, but you still need access to your server.
The Atom feed has different tags to sitemaps, although <lastmod> is the same as <modified> (Atom also offers <issued> and <created>) and <loc> info is to be found in <link>.
But Atom has no equivalent for <changefreq> or <priorty>, so it's not possible to tell Google which pages are most important to your blog.
Also the Atom feed only details the most recent posts; will posts no longer included in the Atom feed be regarded as unimportant?
I'm lucky enough to have 98 per cent of my pages included in Google (but no easy way to find out which have been excluded). So I can't see a benefit to submitting my Atom feed.
However, using sitemaps I've been able to tell Google which posts I'm not bothered about (e.g. a 'I won't be blogging for a few days,' from last year gets a very low priority) and I hope that the two per cent missing from the index are posts I won't worry about.
Check out another article on Google Sitemaps at: http://www.somewhatfrank.com
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