Sometimes Google doesn't exactly rush pell-mell to index your blog. And when Google does index your blog, sometimes they don't do it in a way that really helps your readers.
To my mind, blogs have two kinds of readers:
1. People who read it regularly, via RSS or similar
2. People who find individual articles via a search.
Category #1 isn't really Google's department. Fair enough.
Category #2, of course, is what Google Search is all about. Sure, 99% of queries are about "country matters" and every search engine has them down to a tee, but the queries you really care about are always in that 1% that's obscure and weird and only mentioned in passing on one site ever. And Google's capacity to actually find that stuff is the reason they took over the search world in the first place.
But for a while there, this really wasn't working for the P'unk Avenue Window blog.
Searches like these (with the quotes, making them exact):
"Designing while intoxicated"
"svncampfire"
Were turning up other people linking to or talking about our articles, but they were not turning up the articles themselves. Results on our actual blog always turned out to be category pages or the home page... which, more often than not, didn't feature that content anymore due to the addition of new blog posts.
This poses a problem because people don't know they are interested in something like svncampfire until they need it.
I did quite a bit of research looking for an explanation for Google's dislike of our individual article pages. I considered blaming our robots.txt file, the presence of dates in our article page URLs, and of course sunspots.
But in the process I finally got around to learning about Google Sitemaps. And more importantly, the
Google Sitemap Generator plugin for WordPress, which is beautiful. There's really no other word for it.
A sitemap is a simple file that spells out what pages are on your site and what their relative importance is. You can't use it to increase your overall rank with Google, but you
can use it to promote your individual articles at the expense of things that might otherwise seem more important to Google, like your category pages. Where before Google might only rarely bother to crawl back through your calendar archive links, now Google clearly understands that your posts are special and unique snowflakes that do not wither with age and should be taken equally seriously. And unless you're giving out stock tips or weather reports, this is of the good.
The sitemap plugin will not only generate sitemaps for you, it will automatically update them whenever you post to your blog. Tweak the weightings using the handy control panel and you're good to go.
There is, however, one catch that meant an extra week of waiting before Google finally caught on: the very first time you write a sitemap, you must submit it to Google manually via the
Google Webmaster Tools. The plugin cheerfully informed me that it had already "submitted the sitemap to Google" without mentioning this little fact. So take care to follow through on that detail. You should be using the webmaster tools anyway!
The results are not perfect. Some searches that ought to bring up our individual articles still mysteriously bring up only category pages. And tweets consisting almost entirely of links to our articles (often using the hated URL shorteners, which Google doesn't seem to translate) still often outrank the articles themselves. But hey, it's progress. Most of the time we're on the first page in appropriately narrow searches. It's a big improvement, and I have a much warmer, fuzzier feeling about the usefulness of blogging on topics of lasting interest.
