Recently, I found Google webmaster tools which give you some visibility into your site. You can find problems in your site like broken links and also see some interesting performance stats too.
However, the biggest reason to use the tools is it’s ability to help Google crawl your site better. You can upload a sitemap that tells google about your site so that your site rankings can improve.
If you have a Typepad blog, it’s very easy to publish a site map. However, you need to have a Pro account, since this solution takes advantage of the advanced template feature. I originally found a example template here. However, it didn’t quite meet my needs, so I created my own.
You can find it here.
To install it, just go to your Typepad blog control panel, and click ‘Edit Current Design’. Click the ‘Create new index template’ link, and give the template a name like “Google Sitemap”. In the ‘Output File’ textbox, enter in the file name that you’d like to use for your generated sitemap. For the template body, paste in the contents of the sitemap file found above. Save your new template, and that’s it.
Now, give Google the location of the newly created sitemap, and Google will crawl your site more efficiently.
Enjoy.
Just wanted to say thanks! I added this template to my TypePad blog and it seems to be working well.
The template at SJL.us didn’t work for me, so kudos to you for being what seems like the only person on the Internet with an easy guide to Google Sitemapping a TypePad blog.
Help when I click on the link above I get the following message. What do I do??
“The XML page cannot be displayed
Cannot view XML input using XSL style sheet. Please correct the error and then click the Refresh button, or try again later.
——————————————————————————–
A name was started with an invalid character. Error processing resource ‘http://bystander.typepad.com/files/googleSitemapTe…”
——^
Is it possible to get a sitemap which gives the URLs of ALL your posts? Or does it give only the top page? I generated a site map through sitemapspal but dont get all the URL’s for my site. I have been struggling with this for ages! Please help!
Hi Jyotsna,
The link above is to an xml file, so your browser is trying to load the xml for display. There’s no style sheet associated with it, so your browser is dying. Just right click and save the file, then view it in a text editor.
The above link gives the last 10 or so posts in the sitemap itself. I’m not sure you’d want to include all posts, as that would be a lot of info. Plus, Google will spider your site using your site map, so it will find all your posts anyway.
Thanks.
Thanks a lot Griffin. I’m going to try it out right away.
Hello, I know this is an older post, but I ran across it during a Google search so hopefully you won’t mind getting a question to something you wrote last year.
Here is my question…
In Google’s Web Master Tools as well as Yahoo do you set these up to point to http://example.typepad.com/xyz_abc_123/ or http://example.typepad.com/
I am *pretty* sure you need to use http://example.typepad.com/xyz_abc_123/ but after verifying everything at Google and Yahoo (I am “green light” across the board) and submitting my sitemaps to Yahoo and Google I haven’t been crawled in two weeks. I might need more time to be indexed, but I wanted to make sure I didn’t set things up incorrectly.
Any ideas?
Anonymous,
You need to point google to your .xml file, regardless of your domain. Also, two weeks is a short amount of time. give it two more and you should see something.
Thanks,
Griffin
Is anyone else having problems where the Typepad sitemap doesn’t pick up all the posts and pages. Gooogle have picked up about 150 pages of mine instead of the 450 excluding all the day/month summaries.