Google Power Tools Bible

When you use a mainstream blog site such as Blogger, you don’t need to do any of the steps explained in this section. It is done for you. People who run their own Web site blogs find this section particularly useful.

One of the most important things about getting your blog listed in the Google Blog Search or another blog search engine is that your blog must publish a site feed in either RSS or Atom format, when you run it from your own Web site. In other words, you must set up your personal Web page so that it provides a feed.

One of the advantages of using a Weblog service is that most of them already provide either an RSS or Atom feed or both. By the way, Atom was created by software developers unhappy with RSS. So, RSS and Atom are essentially the same thing with minor differences.

You should consider using an update announcement service for your blog. A service that Google pays attention to is Weblogs.com. Weblogs.com is a free service provided by Verisign. This service, known as an infrastructure ping-server, provides information to people and to services like Google about when blogs have changed. For example, Google contacts Weblogs.com for an update of changes, and Google visits the blog sites that have changed to create a new index of the blog. Most blog services update Weblogs.com for you, but if you need to do this on your own, it’s free and easy to sign up. Just make sure you have a valid RSS or Atom feed. You can validate your feed on the Weblogs.com Web site. When implementing a Weblogs ping service on your own, you need to do so on your Web page. You can find a free PHP library to implement this service on your Web site at www.cadenhead.org/workbench/weblog-pinger/.

After your feed is up and running and you have started using the Weblogs.com ping-server, Google can find and index your blog. If your blog has been going for a while, Google does not index the old posts. Only new posts to your blog appear in the Google Blog Search.