How did I miss Google Sitemaps?
I run the Drupal module, gsitemap, on apocryph.org. However, I didn’t realize that Google has a separate service, Google Sitemap, in which you register (’claim’) your site, and tell Google you’re producing an XML sitemap according to their sitemap specification.
The gsitemap module pings Google whenever you update content, which I thought was enough. Apparently, by registering your site, you can view search stats about it, like the searches that match it most frequently, the pages matched most frequently, etc. Useful info to have, to be sure.
So, I went ahead and created a Google Sitemaps account, and went through the setup process. I chose the General Sitemap (as opposed to the Mobile Sitemap, for sites geared toward PDA and phone browsers). In my case, the sitemap is at http://apocryph.org/gsitemap (UPDATE: The module hasn’t been ported to Drupal 6 so the sitemap is not currently available)
After that, I saw my site in the list of sites. In the ‘Site Verified?’ column, there’s a ‘verify’ link, which I clicked. I was told:
Once we verify that you are the site owner, we can provide you with additional statistics and error information about the pages in your site. If you are unable to verify, you can still use Sitemaps and continue to see information about them.
Basically, you verify by creating a file on the site with a random, arbitrary name. Mine is http://apocryph.org/GOOGLEfe136d02f77cc079.html. To do this I just touch GOOGLEfe136d02f77cc079.html on bonzo. Once I did that, I clicked the ‘Verify’ button, and got a green board.
Now I can get some interesting stats about apocryph, such as..well..no one ever looks at it. Thanks, Google.
UPDATE: Apparently the verification file has to stay around; I deleted it after verification, then found when I logged back in a few days later that my ownership of apocryph.org was back to ‘NOT VERIFIED’. This time I’ll keep the empty html file around indefinitely.
Tags: bonzo, drupal, google, google-sitemap, Migrated from Drupal, tech diary