Hello robots, come on in!
I was poking around with Google’s webmaster toolkit today, and I came to the somewhat shocking realization that not a single one of my blog posts is in the Google index. Whaaaaat? I’d assumed that WordPress in general would be fairly SEO friendly, but such is not the case. I’ve done robots.txt files and sitemaps for other little side projects in the last year or so, but this site has been around so long that it never even crossed my mind to get on the search engine bandwagon. After digging around for approximately half a second, I “found” a pretty sweet plugin to auto-generate a sitemap. I use Yahoo!’s one-click install of WP (still rocking version 2.0.2), so I had to dig around a little for a legacy version of the plugin. While I’m a huge fan of the all-online interface for web-hosting (using Y! for 7 or 8-odd years now is one of the things that makes Heroku so appealing to me), but one thing it doesn’t allow you to do is fun stuff like CHMOD (the sitemap generator needs the sitemap.xml file to be at 777). After looking around a bit further, I found Cyberduck… which also fairly rocks–and made doing the quick CHMOD a cinch.
I’d be a little more excited about my “discoveries” if I wasn’t fairly sure that the rest of the world has known about them for years. Such is life–but hopefully I should start to see a little more Google traffic (already ~50% of my traffic) to pages other than the blog’s home page. Next up on the list–create an actual home page.
