I don’t know how I missed this post. Based the recommendation, I’ve just installed “Google Sitemap Generator Plugin by Arne Brachhold.” and submitted to sitemap.xml to Google webmaster tool.

I setup google webmaster account long time ago, but never used it as you’ve mentioned in here. Thanks for the tips.

I get quite a bit of search traffic generally, and Google usually picks up my new posts very quickly in their search. It’s just for some reason, every now and then I find a post or two that does not show up in my Google Custom Search or in the regular Google web search.

These posts still exist on my blog, and I can even find the title of these posts if I do a phrase search on Google, but it won’t return the actual link for the individual post in a search result.

Maybe if I edit the post and republish it., it will show up. Worth a try maybe.

Your blogspot blog is having a very good page rank, a great number of backlinks and Google has indexed it very well. Since you are updating the blog regularly, the content should be available for search a day or so after submission. Check your Google Analytics account (I saw that you have tracking code installed) and see the percentage of search engine traffic that you are getting. If you are already getting say more than 30 pc or so, you may not need to submit a sitemap for your blogspot blog. Blogger blogs are kind of self optimized.

There is still a way of submiting a sitemap (not a custom designed one) to a blogger blog. A lot of people submit their default atom.xml as sitemap. (Read: http://cantalktech.com/2007/12/15/how-to-make-a-sitemap-for-blogger/). However, you may not need to do it if already you have some search engine traffic.

‘URL not found’ issues do not happen on blogger blogs usually, unless very recently you have deleted a post or so. Try to pick some keyword based titles for your posts so that it is ranked better in searches. Blogger again optimizes your post URLs based on your post titles, a lot of people publish their posts and then change titles to SEO optimize their blogspot posts.

Hope you got my points.

Good luck!

You have made a very well outlined and detailed post on this topic. Could you answer a couple of beginner questions on this please?

I have heard of the importance of Google Sitemaps before, but have never verified my site in order to use it. I have a Blogger hosted blog, and would like to try the Google Webmaster tools, but am not sure about the best way to verify it.

There are two options listed: Adding a meta tag (which I believe is done by pasting in the appropriate section of my blog template), or uploading an HTML file (no idea how to do this). Which is best for my blog, any thoughts on this?

Also, I notice that some of my post links do not show up in Google searches and custom searches of my own page. Is this likely to be an “URL not found” type problem as mentioned in your post?

Thanks!

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@Nagraj, yes Nagraj, helping the Google search engine (with sitemaps etc) and motivating it to crawl more often with regular updates will always help. And needless to say, it will please the readers as well

@Simon, Google is crawling my site on a regular basis and as soon as I post something new, it is available with Google search in a few hours time. I see that you have a Google XML sitemap as well. Perhaps if you don’t see your latest posts on Google search your post frequency could be the problem.

But I also see that you don’t have the ‘ROBOTS’ meta tag in your single posts as well as homepage. You need to fix this (e.g. for single posts, pages, homepage etc use index,follow, for archives use noindex

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