To enable Google to find everything on your web site — even those hidden, unlinked dark little corners — it’s often a good idea to upload sitemaps, which are…drum roll please… maps of your site.
There are any number of sitemap-generating tools available to do this, but my personal favorite is one written by Arne Brachhold, who is apparently a full-time student in Germany who writes open source code in what little spare time he has. Arne’s tool works just brilliantly and is already quite popular among Wordpress bloggers.
The neatest feature is one that also just got me in a bit of trouble. You can configure it so that whenever you change anything in your blog — a new post, a changed heading, whatever — it automatically updates the sitemap and then pings Google.
Usually, that’s probably the best way to go. However, yesterday I was busy testing some features, like email-to-blog and some new tagging plugins. Each time I made a change, Arne (his software, actually) generated a new sitemap and sent it to Google. Turns out Google gets annoyed if you ping it too often with new sitemaps, so I temporarily got put in the infamous (and possibly mythical) Google sandbox until I started behaving myself. Google simply ignored the new sitemaps and callously refused to update its index with my new, compelling content, depriving my loyal readers of latest nuggets.
Moral of the story — turn off automatic Google pinging if you’re about to make a number of changes, then turn it back on afterwards. Afterall, there’s no sense in annoying Google!
Tags: Google, Google sitemaps, Real estate
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�Good news, your equity line and business line of credit rates remain the same as yesterday, as the Fed held short-term rates steady today. Why? Because despite unemployment concerns, the economy is doing fine (1.4% growth year to date-- thank you exports!), core inflation is under control at this point, gas prices have dropped over 6% recently and it's more prudent to maintain a steady helm when the economy appears relatively balanced. Eric T. Trailer, Principal
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