milsoms.com blog

Firstly I submitted the blog url to Google to make sure it has a record of it and get it indexed. It may pick it up from the submission of the milsoms.com domain or site map when I do it but I will submit it direct as well

http://www.google.com/addurl

I can check whether Google has already visited my blog by doing a search for

cache:http://www.milsoms.com/blog

If it has it will show the time visited and the cached version of the page (mine is not visited yet)

Go back to Google sitemaps page, make sure the blog url http://milsoms.com/blog has been added to the account (note that if you have verified the parent domain, the blog site will be automatically verified)
Submit a sitemap - the sitemap url is the RSS feed for the blog

http://milsoms.com/blog/wp-rss2.php

NOTE that both the site url and the RSS feed have the “www” removed even if it is there in the main site url - it has to be like this for it to work

Once the sitemap has been crawled, whenever it changes you can ping Google to tell them and encourage a re-crawl. This cost me a lot of money to find out, but it does work. The url for the ping to Google sitemaps is

http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=http%3A%2F%2Fmilsoms.com%2Fblog%2Fwp-rss2.php

It needs to have : shown as %3A and / shown as %2F (it is a coding thing they tell me!)

Update to this entry

Google sitemaps is having trouble with this and keeps showing errors, saying is is unable to read the sitemap (RSS feed in this case)

This seems to be a confusion between the domain address www.milsoms.com and the rss feed address milsoms.com/blog

Steps to check and correct it:

1. Added the RSS feed http://milsoms.com/blog/wp-rss2.php as content to My Yahoo page and it is reading the feed fine
2. Check that the google sitemaps account has http://milsoms.com/blog as a verified site - it is there but showing as NOT verified.
3. Went through the verification process, choosing to create an html file called google33851e2920c031a9.html as specified (easier than putting a metatag into the Wordpress template header) - now verified OK.
   
4. Back to sitemaps page, select the RSS feed and resubmit