Get listed a little quicker

I wanted to quickly throw in a post about how to get your blog changes listed in Google's Blogsearch a little faster than normal. You can do this in a few ways. You might know all this, and might not. If you do, well, congratulations! If you don't, read on! :)

Around the beginning of October I believe, Google released their blog pinging service to the public. It basically provides a little documentation about how to manually tell Google crawlers that your blog has been updated, and they should come running and scan. Google already monitors all top pinging services automatically, so chances are these methods won't help your cause too much. But, it's always a good idea to do it yourself, if not for the viewers, then for your peace of mind.

So, the first way and the easiest, is to hook up to Google Blogsearch using Feedburner. They have a service known as 'Pingshot' under their 'Publicize' tab. This lists out various services that Feedburner can automatically ping for you whenever it checks your feed and sees an update. This is the most powerful thing you can have, with having no work to do on your own, and from personal experience, I can tell you that this does increase your feed readership. Feedburner checks your feed every half an hour, which might be too long for some people. Hence, Feedburner also provides a manual way of pinging them, so that they ping all those services quicker.

The second and harder method is set up your own REST call to Google Blogsearch, or an XML-RPC ping call. These will immediately send off their crawlers to your page (or sooner than normal! :P ) These are slightly harder to get going, especially since Blogger lacks a native pinging mechanism. The documentation can be found here if you're interested!

I personally prefer using Feedburner, since it automates the task. I'd never want to manually go fill up a form after writing a long 'long' post. Too much of a brainwreck! And, tries to manually ping Google using the form they provide didn't yield any results You can see the list of latest crawled pages here. This is updated very quickly, so don't wait too long between reloads, or else you'll miss your site (if it gets there!), so best of luck with that!

Get pinging and get noticed! :)

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Here's another reason to start using Feedburner for more than offering your feed in all the formats as requested per services. Feedburner now offers site statistics, for free! Yep! And it's quite good, and shows incoming as well as outgoing links. It shows how much traffic has come in from searches, and how much from other sites. All you have to do is add a small Feedflare code to your template to track the stats. The code they offer contains the post permalink tag from the old Blogger, so change it to data:post.url when you put it in. You can hide it later using CSS if you don't want people to see it. They update the stats every 30 minutes (like their feeds). However, there is no per page statistics in the free version. For that, they ask you to upgrade to their Total Stats Pro. But this is good enough for anyone not professionally into blogging, I think. Go ahead, try it out!