Chorus Line points out a new feature that will enable blogspotters to verify their sites on sitemaps. As an alternate to the frustratingly impossible file upload method, you can use a special meta-tag for the purpose. Pretty cool. For more, see Google's "claiming your site" help page.

Claiming was a snap. Log in to sitemaps with a Gmail or Google account, enter your URL to add the site, and then select verify as an option. Open your blogger template in another window, because you'll paste in the new tag while you're on the verify page, and republish. It looks like you can get away with republishing the index only in the first instance, to get the ball rolling,

Sitemap construction on the site is not difficult, but it isn't immediately transparent for Blogspot users either. Enter the URL of your blog's atom feed in the box to identify your sitemap file, and check the radio boxes next to all 3 of the questions...

So, Freshblog has now been "verified," and comes equipped with quality sitemappage. Let's see what we learn.

To ping for updates, which is required so that the sitemap reflects the latest situation on your blog, you can use either Johan's Sitemap Pinger (which generates the URL for you, and shows you the status report for your ping) or any of the 3 methods suggested by Improbulus in her comprehensive Sitemap how-to.

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