Further adventures with blogging, search, and what *is* that smell?!

In my continued blogquest, I have been working primarily with this blog and my wordpress one.

Why? Because I really like their themes, but they are really having problems getting hits at google and dogpile.

What to do? What to do?

I've been trying to get them validated and added as websites to index via google's web site management tool. I've been trying to manage their pings, add them manually, work with technorati. But despite my best efforts, none of them work as well as livejournal. Nothing touches that site in terms of quick addition to just exactly the right search engines.

Meanwhile though I have learned that pingbacks are better than trackbacks. That using google's feed reader (googlereader) will help google realize your blog is out there and index it. That google goes at whatever the hell pace it wants to to index your site and unless you shell out some dough, there's nothing you can do about it.

There is such a thing as pingoat, which should, eventually help you let search engines know you are out there. Weblogs.com also helps. You can go to google directly to add your site (when they get around to it), as well as ping technorati. Dogpile will also help ping all the appropriate serch engines, for a pretty hefty fee.

Just wanted to update you on my continued attempts while trying to decide on the blogs I am keeping to record the adventures of a server grrl.

And I was just kidding about the smell.... ; )

I am adding this text: servergrrl to see what happens. This is something I am supposed to add to a post to get it tagged by technorati... here goes

googledcab8e4e5d79cfd0

So I am trying to get google to find my blog better. I went to Business Solutions on the Google home page and they have this webmaster tool that (I think) is supposed to encourage Google to search your site.

To that end, you first have to enter the site URL that you want Google to search, then you have to be verified as the owner by adding page or metatag to the site. I don't really know how to add the metatag to a Blogger site, so I thought I'd add the HTML page.

But how? Well, I noticed that blog entries on Blogger are named by their title.html. So I thought I'd create this post and see what happens.

Update: Well that didn't work. You see Google requires that you add the html page with the special google-generated name to the root of your site. You cannot specify where the file goes. my blog entries on the site are organized by date. So the blog entry link for this post is the site's URL/2007/07/..then the name of the post. Google wants it to be site's URL/name of the post.

There is a second option for verifying a site for Google to index, and that's adding a metatag to the home page. I am not sure exactly how to do that on a Blogger site, but what I did is go into the dashboard for the blog and edit the template for the blog. That put me into some HTML that showed the "head" section of code, and that's where I put the, again, google-generated metatag. I checked to make sure my blog still looks the same, saved the change, then closed out. I then tried to get Google to verify the site as mine.

Notice I said "tried" because then Google had a "Our system has experienced a temporary problem error." The explanation was that too many people were trying to verify their sites at the exact same time. Rriiigghhtt.

So there you go. The attempt to get Google to see me continues...

Second update: Woo hoo, I have been Verified! Now I just need to add a sitemap so that google will index it or something. More on that later as well...

Welcome to the Adventures of Server Grrl

I've had a blog elsewhere for years, full of the technical flotsam and jetsam of my life. But now, you see, I have written this book about Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (I am now editing it) and have been given the advice that the book might need its own blog pages.

So, here they are.

This blog was meant to offer readers a place to communicate with me directly, and for me to communicate with them directly as well. There were so, so, so many things I wanted to put in the book that I couldn't. Along the way there are things that I learned and experienced concerning WSS that I weren't appropriate for the book for one reason or another that I wish I could tell people about. Maybe ask them what they thought of this concept or that to be added to the next edition of the book, maybe to see what we can afford to take out.

So here is where those thoughts will be taking place, those lessons will be mentioned, and those questions will be asked.

This blog is going to be a transition from my old blog-- http://callahansspace.spaces.live.com/, so there may be some transitional articles posted on both for my old readers and my new ones. So for those who notice the redundancy, it will be intentional.