RSS Feed Submission
July 7, 2008
If you have not done so already, it is recommended to read a prior blog post about sitemaps and search engine submission.
RSS feeds are a great and non-intrusive way to tell both people and search engines about the changing content of your website. If you’re using Wordpress, then a “Ping” is sent to the site ping-o-matic when new content is published. This is the default configuration. However, there are some who manually add a list of sites to ping in lieu of using Ping-O-Matic alone. There are others, like myself, who opt to do something different.
Using Feedburner
Let feedburner do the pinging for you. Since Google acquired Feedburner, using Feedburner to do all the pinging leg work makes the most sense. This can be done using the Feedburner Feedsmith plugin for wordpress.
Rather than having your standalone Wordpress site handle all of your RSS traffic, you can offload this task by giving it to feedburner. Feedburner can be configured to send Pings to Ping-O-Matic and more.
Sites that Feedburner Pings
In addition, Feedburner can be configured to Ping 5 additional services.
- Weblogs.com
- Blogdigger
- Syndic8
- Alexa
- Snap
- Icerocket
- Tailrank
- Blog Buzz Machine
- Feedblitz
- Bloggarkivet
- Blogblogs
- Bloggrevyen
- Feed Crier
- Moreover
After installing the feedburner plugin, in Wordpress v2.5.1, changing the pinging service is easily done at the bottom of the Settings -> Writing page.
Change :
http://rpc.pingomatic.com
To :
http://ping.feedburner.com
You can also add your feedburner RSS feed to a couple of search engines. For more information on this, consult Tips for New Bloggers.
Search Engine Submission
July 7, 2008
There are some who advocate that search engine submission is not necessary. These people state that search engines find websites naturally through links on other websites, blog comments, forum signatures, and link directories. However, I’m sure that the search engines have created their link submission page for a reason — they want to be informed of new sites. Multiple redundant submissions to the same search engine is strongly discouraged.
Submit your site to Google
Submit your blog to Google Blog Search
Submit your site to Yahoo!
Submit your site to MSN
In addition, the search engines like sitemaps. Wordpress has a nice plugin that generates a Google compliant sitemap. If you’re not using a blog, then you can use a paid ($19.99) .PHP script to generate a sitemap consisting of an unlimited number of links. The free version of this same script limits the size of a sitemap to 500 links.
Getting the word out about your sitemap
Once the sitemap is generated, it is highly recommended to tell the search engines about its presence. This can be done automatically! In order to do this, amend the robots.txt file to point to the sitemap’s location. As an example, I have included some information from this site’s robots.txt file.
User-agent: * Crawl-delay: 20 Sitemap: http://www.shop-network.org/sitemap-1.xml.gz Sitemap: http://www.shop-network.org/sitemap-2.xml.gz
You’ll notice that I’ve bolded a couple of search engine instructions. Since each reputable search engine that visits a site complies with the robots.txt standard, you can be assured that including sitemap information in the robots.txt file will get your URLs noticed. You’ll also notice that I have two sitemaps, and that I have Gzipped each of them. This is because Google limits the number of URLs in an individual sitemap to 50,000. In addition, Google limits the size of the sitemaps it accepts to 10MB in size. For sites with many urls, compressing the sitemap saves bandwidth.
To add another layer of search engine visibility, tell Google about your sitemap through the Google Webmaster Interface and tell Yahoo! about your sitemap though the Yahoo! Site Explorer.
Read our blog post about RSS Feed Submission.