Wednesday, December 28, 2005

Google Irony AKA Blogspot et al vs Sitemaps et Verification

I finally found some time to start optimising my holistic approach to making these blog things pay for themselves, or at least upping the visitor numbers somewhat.

No, I don't mean I've started a new ultra-rightwing, conservative, foaming-at-the-mouth, nationalistic, pig-ignorant Arab-bashing blog. That would be too easy a way to generate loads of comments and links.

Instead, I've started going through the nice shiny tips William Nabaza has helpfully compiled in "10 Secret Ways Of Getting Your Website Listed on Google". He's obviously done quite a good job as his content is being ripped off, sorry, I mean syndicated by just about EVERYBODY.

One of the most important things to getting good coverage of your blog or any other type of website is ensuring it's fully indexed by Google. Google Sitemaps is a new service that attempts to improve the accuracy of their index of your site as well as give you access to handy statistics and information about errors.

Where does the irony come from? Well... in order to get access to those statistics, you have to upload a tiny text file to your website that Google then uses to verify your ownership of the site.

Quite a few blogging services don't allow uploading of files to their servers. This includes blogspot, part of the Google empire and also the blogging tool used by Google to publish information about, you guessed it... Google!

One of the best postings about this seems to be unavailable now but you can still get the, ahem, Google cache of it here. Technorati's search results are here.

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