HIDDEN SECRETS

Submitting your Blog's sitemap to these search engines will enable them to index the pages and contents of the site. Needless to say, having all the pages indexed will essentially avail your contents to more internet users and improve your site's page rank.

Blogger Sitemap

If you own an external domain site, you can search the net for sitemap generators which help you create a sitemap file. Upload the file onto the root directory and call it sitemap.xml. The full URL of the sitemap will then be something like this:- “http://domainname.com/sitemap.xml”

However, we cannot upload files onto the root directory of Blogger blogs. Hence, when asked to insert a Blogger blog sitemap, it will have to be either:-

http://YOURBLOGNAME.blogspot.com/rss.xml

OR

http://YOURBLOGNAME.blogspot.com/atom.xml

Replace YOURBLOGNAME with the name of your blog. For Blogger blogs, do not add "www." to YOURBLOGNAME. As an example, our blog's sitemap will be http://bloggertipandtrick.blogspot.com/rss.xml

Submit Blog Sitemap to MSN

Unlike Google and Yahoo!, MSN does not have a set of procedures or an address where you can submit sitemaps to. In the latest post in their Microsoft Live Search Weblog, they had invited webmasters and developers to help build a New Webmaster Portal that would include sitemap creation, submission and ping tools, very much what Google and Yahoo! already had. Once MSN has that user interface, we shall update this article.

The MSN team had suggested that webmasters add this to their robots.txt file to have the MSN spiders crawl the sitemap file:-

User-agent: *
Sitemap: http://domainname.com/sitemap.xml

Again, we do not have root access to the Blogger server and this will not avail to us.

The alternative solution in the meantime is to submit the Blog sitemap to Moreover.com. It seemed that there was a standing arrangement for Moreover to provide the submitted feeds to MSN for crawling and indexing.

Whether or not the arrangement still holds true, there is really no harm in submitting your sitemap to Moreover.

Copy and paste this line into your internet browser, replacing the portion in red with the name of your Blog:-

http://api.moreover.com/ping?u=http://YOURBLOGNAME.blogspot.com/rss.xml

If you have submitted it correctly, you should see this message:-

Thank you for your ping. The moreover database will be updated with the new data from your url - http://YOURBLOGNAME.blogspot.com/rss.xml as soon as possible.

Submit Blog Sitemap to Ask.com

Ask.com, previously known as Ask Jeeves, is the next major internet search engine. The sites that it owns include Excite, Bloglines, MyWay and iWon. It is also a participant of the Sitemaps protocol program.

Submitting the sitemap to Ask is easy too. Copy and paste this line into your internet browser, replacing the portion in red with the name of your Blog:-

http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http://YOURBLOGNAME.blogspot.com/rss.xml


Submit Sitemaps to other search engines

Progressively, there should be more search engines that will join this Sitemaps program. More likely than not, they will use the recommended ping submission format:-

http://search-engine-url/ping?sitemap=http://YOURBLOGNAME.blogspot.com/rss.xml

If you are unable to find a submission link in that search engine site, try the above and keep your fingers crossed that it is the correct ping address.