Whether you are using the full version of WordPress or WordPressMU on wordpress.com or one of the other WordPressMU -driven sites, you may want to take advantage of the new Google Blogsearch by submitting your site to Google’s Sitemap Submission.
You should also know that you don’t have to do these sitemap submissions. Google and other search engines find WordPress blogs without much help. This site was listed with Google within 12 hours – which was astounding to me. But if you are determined to get maximium coverage, this information will help.
WordPressMU and wordpress.com Users Instructions for Google Sitemap Submission
When Google Sitemap Submission began, the following was the technique that worked for WordPress.com blogs. Google has changed the submission technique and currently, the following no longer works. WordPress.com blogs automatically ping Google every time you post to your blog, so submitting a WordPress.com blog to Google is redundant. Google will find you within a few minutes, typically. So the following is redundant and unnecessary.
I’ve left the instructions just in case they change their system back to include this method.
If you are using WordPressMU and wordpress.com, or another WordPressMU-driven site, the work is basically done for you. You can submit your entire site, your site’s comments, or your site’s specific categories to the Google Sitemap Submission service.
Simply copy the feed links from your site. They are found within the sidebar or footer.
The feed link for your entire site looks like this:
http://example.wordpress.com/feed/
The feed link for a specific category on your site looks like this, but replace blog-babble with the permalink URL for your specific category:
http://example.wordpress.com/category/blog-babble/feed/
The feed link for comments on your site, if you wish to submit those, too, looks like:
http://example.wordpress.com/comments/feed/
If you are having trouble with Google recognizing your category feed, try the non-permalink link to your category feed, using the ID number for your category found on the Manage > Categories panel:
http://example.wordpress.com/wp-rss2.php?cat=42
Login to Google’s Sitemap Submission and click Add Site and then enter in each of the above links in the URL Sitemap form box. If there is something wrong with the link or it is not found, the form will tell you immediately so you can fix the problem. Once submitted, your site will be pending until the information has been gathered. You can revisit the Google Sitemap Submission Account page to check the status of when your site was last checked by Google.
Full WordPress Users Instructions for Google Sitemap Submission
Users of the full version of WordPress can do the same techniques as above, or use one of the many resources found on the WordPress Codex for manual creation of Google sitemaps for submission to Google Sitemaps and Google Blog Search. There are plugins which will create a Google Sitemap for you automatically, and instructions on creating your own. Whichever way you choose, make sure you update these sitemaps after any major changes to your site.
If you are using permalinks, then the permalink examples above describe how to add your categories to Google’s Sitemap Submission. If you are not using permalinks, be sure and use the last example for your feed submission.
For more information on submitting your WordPress site to Google Sitemap Submission for inclusion in the Google Blog Search and Google site search:
- WordPress Codex – How to Submit Your WordPress Site to Search Engines, Google Sitemaps and Google Blog Search
- WordPress Feeds
- Customizing WordPress Feeds
- WordPress Plugins for Syndication and Site Submission
site search tags: wordpress, tagging, blog, blog search, google, google blog search, google blog, google blogsearch, blog search, search, google sitemap, google sitemap submission
Lorelle on WordPress 
32 Comments
For anyone who’s interested… I have a script that turns your Google compliant XML sitemap into a Yahoo compliant sitemap that you can submit to Yahoo.
It’s free.
http://www.ielliott.com/2005/10/31/google-to-yahoo-sitemap/
Any idea on how to “verify” yourself as the owner of a WordPress.com website when you don’t have access to upload an HTML file and you can’t generate meta-tags?
Honestly, if you have a WordPress.com blog, then skip submitting your sitemap. WordPress.com’s pinging service gets you totally into Google. Focus on creating intrasite links between your posts, use Most Recent Posts in your sidebar, and choose a Theme with good intrasite links well-featured, and you don’t have to bother with this. Google finds you and crawls WordPress blogs REALLY well. Submitting a Google site map would be redundant, and could penalize you.
Be sure and create a body of work, about two to three months of consistent blogging before you do a search on Google to find out how many posts it has found. Usually they are found by Google within hours, but you make it into the page ranking through time and volume.
As for verification, I didn’t have to go through that when I wrote this article and submitted my blogs. This may be a new feature. All you should need is to follow the instructions above.
As for meta tags, some WordPress Themes include meta tags in their Theme’s header. Check your source code to find out if they do. If they didn’t, understand that few search engines even pay attention to meta tags any more, so they aren’t the SEO feature they used to be. Too many people abused them.
Pings are the way to go and you can get much more mileage to know who WordPress.com pings and how to ping other search engines and directories.
Thanks for this post.
do you have any advice on what to do if your site was indexed in google, and then got taken out? please email me back if you can, thanks!
how do you modify the robots.txt file in your wordpress.com blog?
You can’t modify or have access to your .htaccess files in WordPress.com.
If your site has been removed from Google, you have a few choices. Just let it go and in a few months it may be reconsidered unless it was doing something ugly, and focus on other search engines. Google is not the end all and be all. Or file a complaint using Google’s procedures. Or start a new blog and be EVERY careful not to offend, steal, or do evil uglies.
And don’t ask people to email you back in comments, unless you have a job offer. 😉 Just check blog comments for an answer. I keep all my answers public, not private.
>>>As for verification, I didn’t have to go through that when I wrote this article and submitted my blogs. This may be a new feature. All you should need is to follow the instructions above.<<<
You must not have done this with a wordpress.com blog.
As I stated, I was able to do this with my wordpress.com blog but it was early days of Google sitemaps. Honestly, you don’t have to do this. It’s obsolete. Your blog is automatically submitted with every post with pings through Ping-o-matic. This is redundant. So if you have a wordpress.com blog, don’t use this.
And apologizes. While editing the link in your comment, I suffered a break in our electricity, the joys of living with the ruins of Hurricane Katrina a year later. It mangled the comment. Sorry. But the intent is the same.
Elliott, your link resulted into this error:
Forbidden
You don’t have permission to access /2005/10/31/google-to-yahoo-sitemap/ on this server.
Additionally, a 403 Forbidden error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
I just checked and the link works fine.
http://www.merchantcircle.com/blogs/Green.Alvin.Studio.718-453-0693
Thanks for the article.
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If you have a WordPress.com blog, If you do submit your site, expect it to drop in and out of Google for months. If you submit your site I don’t know how long it will take for your blog to stabilize in the search engines, but I submitted one site and yes every 2 weeks when the Google bot comes by everything is dropped and only tags on wordpress are left in the search engine which have 0 reanking ability (they don’t come in the top spots)I get my traffic back and then it happens again. I have other blogs that I have never submitted and they work fine, and yes they get search traffic. I say it again Never Never do it if you have a wordpress blog. I cannot agree more with Lorelle, skip submitting your sitemap ad URLs. WordPress.com’s pinging service gets you totally into Google.
Thanks a lot for this article. Useful and very easy to understanded. Make my life easier.
Thanks for your information, my all doubts are cleared about sitemap.
Thank you for full review of sitemaps.
I will try this techniqe on my blog
I noticed that pinging does not really work well with posts you timestamp so they will be published later on. That’s why I still have the sitemap stuff running. I don’t think I’ve been punished for it (why would I? Its their service!)
ah, AND I just noticed that google suddenly thinks that the xxx/feed/ is no longer compliant with what they expect. So you run into errors there. No idea how that will influence google.
is this method still working ? do we need to submit sitemaps to google ?
@linuxunix:
You don’t have to do anything with WordPress.com blogs. No worries there. But if you want extra SEO coverage, you can do this with a full version blog, but I also recommend you read this on autodiscoverable sitemaps. WordPress blogs are very Google-friendly, so unless you tweak and screw around with your WordPress Theme, I wouldn’t worry about it.
Thanks for your article. I just follow what you wrote in this article. Then just hoping google with index my page quickly.
Thanks again 🙂
Really Its very help full, I have benefited with this above information.
wrote a whole writeup on how to do this w/ WordPress.com new integrated XML sitemaps.
hi
i got my blog as http://www.xxx.net/wordpress ( xxx is for any alphabet )
Does this mean i’m on wordpress.com?
thnx
It doesn’t not. It means you have the full version of WordPress. I would, however, recommend that you get your blog administrator to change your blog’s URL to remove the /wordpress part because unless you blog about WordPress, it is not necessary and can dilute your page rank and search engine results.
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You can use another easy way – Creating Sitemaps for Google, MSN and Yahoo! – The Easy Way
They offer free sitemap creator
http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/
I am always using it
Hi Folks ,
I am new to blogging , i was asking you guys about the secret to blog traffic …
Thanks in advance
I don’t have any secrets. Put ALL of your effort into your content and your social networks and forget about any secrets or blog traffic.
12 Trackbacks/Pingbacks
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