Huge help once again from Improbulus, defining, exploring & explaining Google Sitemaps & what the service can do for you. There's 3 posts over there, one long for the tech wonks, one short for the quick-starters, & one verification clarification, that make the whole thing seem straightforward, sensible and worthwhile even without the verification part. The trick, it seems, is that a feed is also a valid sitemap, so we can skip that whole "build your map" malarkey (assuming that you have a valid & functioning feed) & go straight to submission, pinging, frequent re-indexing and world domination......
... well, submission and pinging, at least.....
Filed in: search, blogs, blogging, blogtech, google
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Only thing I'd emphasise is that unfortunately a feed doesn't usually encompass the whole blog, so we're limited to only the posts that are in the feed being crawled, but as a way of pinging Google to get new posts crawled I think it's pretty useful.