Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Blogger feeds

I use Google's Webmaster Tools to help track how Google sees my websites (including this blog). I find it very useful, especially in combination with a tool such as Google Analytics.

In Webmaster Tools, one can submit sitemaps for your site. Submitting a sitemap for a blogger blog is very straightforward: just add the feeds. I use three:

  • feeds/posts/default - This is the basic feed for the blog. The main problem is this feed does not work if you have it forwarding to Feedburner. If that is the case, use this one instead: feeds/posts/default?orderby=updated.
  • feeds/comments/default - I also add a feed for the comments since blog readers' comments can add valuable content to a blog. Sometimes the conversation is more valuable than the original topic.
  • feeds/pages/default - This one is for Blogger in draft users. Pages do not show up in the posts feed, so add this one to get pages indexed.

4 comments:

  1. Your a guy who knows his way around blogger. How can I find like minded bloggers on here? By that I mean by age (in my case ancient, decrepit and old,) by interests such as Technology, or being a twit, or a Geek, or even by where a person resides such as the UK?
    I can't find a way of doing this on Blogger which seems really strange when its a Google product and they have their famous search engine

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  2. Thanks for the compliment. I would not describe myself as knowing my way around blogger, but I am a programmer and I can mess with stuff at a low level.

    My way of finding bloggers I like is through my social graph using a variety of services. However, I think you can get to the functionality you want in Blogger by visiting your profile.

    Once there, click on an interest and then you will see other bloggers who have put that down as an interest. This does not allow for complex queries, but it seems better than nothing.

    Personally, I would suggest using Buzz and Google Reader and seeing what you find that way.

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  3. I think your tip just saved me...I've added some pages now that blogger allows us to do that, and have optimized each page in my hacked html template...but that was a week ago and still the pages (except 1) were not showing up in google search. I just now submitted a new site map in Webmaster tools for feeds/pages/default for my site at www.2stampis2b.com, so we'll see if this fixes my issue! Thanks so much!

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  4. Great! I am glad to help. I hope your pages get indexed soon.

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