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Google Sitemaps and Yahoo Blog n Ping |
For those of you who doesn't know this already, Google Sitemaps are one of the essential tools in any website owner's arsenal.
It is relatively easy to get indexed in Google. You just need to ensure that your newly created site is linked to in some or other fashion - from another website or a web directory. Your site will be picked up and indexed into Google within a day or two. But Google will most likely only index the first page of your site on its first visit - spidering more deeply down into the content of your site on return visits. And these might be far and few in between.
But with Google Sitemaps you now have a failsafe way to get your whole site indexed in less than two days.
The process is simple:
Step 1: Create a Google Sitemap Account here : http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login
Step 2: Use a tool to generate a Sitemap of your site. A Sitemap is exactly what it says - a map of your site with links to all its pages.
I use the following tool - it is easy to use and free (but please make a donation - people work hard at creating software!)
http://johannesmueller.com/gs/
Step 3: Once you have created your Sitemap, UPLOAD it to your site, then you submit it to Google and within 2 days your site will be completely indexed.
But please note of course, having your site indexed does not neccessarily mean that you will appear on the first page of the search results! That takes a bit more effort. But getting your site fullly spidered is a bit like trying to win the lottery - at least you now have a ticket!
Yahoo does not have the same facility, but there is a 'back way' to getting your site fully indexed - the so-called 'Blog and ping technique'. I recently tried this but have to say that Google is just so much more efficient. After 4 days I have had no luck with Yahoo yet.
It works like this:
Step 1: Create a blog. You can use Blogger - the free Google Blogging tool, or Wordpress, or even Mambo, as I have explained in other posts. On this Blog you put a reference to your site somewhere.
Step 2: Create a Yahoo account and log into MY-Yahoo. At the bottom of the page you will see that you can add content. There might also be a heading that says: RSS Headlines (BETA).
Select the ADD option. The following screen will appear:
Enter the path to your blog and save. Now this is where it might get tricky. When I first tried this Yahoo refused to recognize the full path to my RSS blog on my Tailormade4you Website. At that stage, my site www.tm4y.co.za was not yet indexed AT ALL by Yahoo. I then left it for a day or two until the Yahoo Spider picked up the first page. Then I went back to try and add it again, but it still didn't want to recognise the full RSS feed URL. In desperation I just added the normal site URL (www.tm4y.co.za). It accepted that!
But..... 4 days down the line I am still waiting to get spidered. I have now added in these links to the site itself (above) and will see if anything changes.
And one thing that I forgot is that you can explicitly ping Yahoo to inform them that you have added a new blog content. The link looks like this:
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping?u=http://www.tm4y.co.za
I have now done this as well and will see what happens.
I have recently read some posts from blogging experts who said that because of misuse of Blogging and Pinging, Yahoo might be shutting down this 'backdoor' into getting fully spidered.
So the verdict is out.....
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