About 3 weeks ago, I was using Google's Webmaster Tools to get an overview of my blogs. While I was on the Dashboard page, I focused on the "Sitemaps" section in the lower right of the page. There, it had a link to "Submit a Sitemap".I always ignored this because my blogs are all hosted on Google Blogger and each has only one URL. And, since it was in Blogger, I did not think that I had a sitemap.
But, being curious, I clicked on the link, and I discovered that since the blog was distributed by Feedburner, I was given the opportunity to submit the sitemap "fe
The next day I revisited Webmaster Tools and saw my sitemap listing which had 1 URL in the web index. However, the Status was not checked. Instead it had an error.
Great, I thought. I now successfully messed up my blog listing in Google, but I could not figure out how to remove the sitemap. So I just shrugged my shoulders and let it be.
About a week later, I noticed an increase in search traffic primarily from Yahoo, Bing, Ask and even Google.
This week, I noticed that my Sitemap status is now checked with green, meaning it is accepted and is fine. I looked at each blog in Webmaster Tools and saw that each had a green check, meaning they all had an OK status.
Finally, I realized that the sitemap submission is responsible for bringing me to more search engine traffic. The sitemap provides a vehicle to help search engines crawl the site more intelligently. Since my Feedburner sitemap provides those engines with an organized list of posts, they are now able to cross-index my content with user submitted search engine requests.
To me, this was one of the missing links in the distribution of my blogs. Now, my visitor count has tripled on a quiet day, but increased 10-fold on days that I wrote new posts.
So, if your blog is hosted on Blogger and distributed by Feedburner, I suggest you submit your feed as a sitemap to Google. You may initially see the same errors as I did, but within a month you will probably begin receiving more traffic as well!
I hope this helps each of you. Please let me know if you do submit your sitemap and if your traffic increases as well.
For more information, refer to:
I just added the feed as a sitemap for two of my blogs. It's not finding all my blogs (they're all on blogger, on the same accout, so why not?)
ReplyDeleteI'll see what happens