Blogger Hacks, Categories, Tips & Tricks

Thursday, November 17, 2005
Google Sitemaps and Verification
There's a post at Micropersuasion pointing to Google Sitemaps resources, (noteably a Sitepoint how-to) which brings up an interesting conundrum for blogspot blogs.

First, on sitemaps, see the exhaustive post from Improbulus at A Consuming Experience. This is an interesting Google service that enables them to crawl your site more comprehensively, generating stats that are of use to you in the process. If your site has a feed, the service can read the feed as a sitemap & detect updates that way, which is pretty cool. Here's the thing, though. For full feedback of stats, they ask you to verify that you're the site owner by uploading a file to the root of your site. Presumably this is a measure to prevent the gathering of competitive intelligence. Laudable, since "valuable" site stats shouldn't fall into the wrong hands. Of course here's where things get tricky because verification is a problem here in blogspot land!!

I can't upload anything to the root of the server this blog is hosted on, & so can't take full advantage of the service. Speedy crawl is nice, but speedy crawl with the full-featured stats detailed at Sitepoint would be cooler. So hey, Blogger / Google, I'd like to be able to verify, please!!

The irony is that the official Google Sitemaps blog is a blogspot blog, & so presumably has a limited sitemap also....

I have posted about this before, & would like to see the integration between Google's divisions to enable this feature for blogspot.

Posted at 1:47 PM by John.

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