I’ve wrestled with trying to submit a sitemap for Google Webmaster Tools for some time now. It’s obviously important for my site, and also yours, if you have one, to show up in the best search engine around. Google is the way of the future, or at least the way since 1997.
Apparently, a sitemap is already submitted to common search engines by WordPress, but this is about using Google Webmaster Tools after all, and I wanted to have control over what I’m submitting thank you very much.
Long story short, trial-and-error after trial-and-error, I finally decided to use Google itself to find the answer, and I found various sources, one being here, at myinternetstuff.wordpress.com. Furthermore, I found another, newer and better solution here. At the moment, /sitemap.xml is “Pending” up and running.
The answer is submitting my blog’s feed url as the sitemap. Submitting my feed located at tech-gap.net/rss worked like a charm, however, due to fairly recent developments, I am going to use /sitemap.xml instead. There were some urls that did not work for me. However, all the urls below have worked for somebody, somewhere. I’m going to leave up the feed sitemaps because I had some success with them, but just so you know, using feeds instead of xml as a google sitemap is out of date. Use /sitemap.xml, because being that it’s the most recent development regarding sitemaps with WordPress.com, it is better. It’s giving me more urls, 14 instead of 7. I think that’s better. I had no idea that the other one was leaving out half my blog.
- http://yourname.wordpress.com/sitemap.xml
- http://yourname.wordpress.com/rss
- http://yourname.wordpress.com/feed
- http://yourname.wordpress.com/?feed=atom
Others have also had luck submitting sitemap in .xml format to google, but I’ve had no luck with that myself. Frankly, this sitemap business seems to be hit or miss. For some, using /feed works, for others, using /?feed=atom worked great, others suggest /rss, yet all of those take me to my blog’s rss feed.
Maybe Lorelle was right. Oh well. It’s done now, working and error-free.
