So today I get email from Ben Shaffer (he runs a high-paying keyword site) announcing his new AdSense Discovery package, a set of books, software, audios and videos aimed at those who want to get started with AdSense. (No, sadly, I'm not one of the “gurus” he interviews. Nobody seems to want to interview me… wah, wah, wah…) I can't comment on the quality of the package since I haven't seen it yet and I'm not sure I have the time to actually review it for a while. I'd be curious to hear your comments about it if you do buy it.

If the free three-month membership to Ben's keyword site interests you (he gave me a free membership a long time ago, though I don't really use it, so I can attest that the site is at least legitimate), be sure to keep in mind the caveats I mentioned in my high-paying keywords series. Remember, it's rare that an advertiser will actually pay the top price shown for an ad. There's often a large drop between the first and second place bids and other factors (like smart pricing, separate bidding for the content network, landing page quality) can further reduce the final price an advertiser pays. (Sometimes quite drastically — I was able recently to change an AdWords ad I placed that had an $11 per click minimum to $0.45 per click just by working on the landing pages. It took some work, though.)

What really interested me, though, was the price for the entire package. Surprisingly enough, Ben is actually selling this package for a semi-reasonable $67, which is much lower than I've seen for most of these kinds of packages. (I suspect $67 is probably a minimum price to get enough attention from affiliates.) I was expecting to see $147 when I clicked the order button. I'm finishing up my new e-book, Uncommon AdSense, and I don't plan on charging much for it, either. (How does $37 sound to you for a 100-page e-book packed full of info?) I wonder if this is a trend? Perhaps the market for the overpriced packages has finally been saturated?

Or maybe I'm just being silly. Sorry, don't know what came over me…

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Eric Giguere wrote Make Easy Money with Google, which is not the spammy get-rich book you might think it is, and is about to release (finally) Uncommon AdSense, a book aimed at more experienced AdSense publishers. And no, it won't be overpriced.

As I mentioned yesterday, I finally got around to building a Google Sitemap for this blog. What follows are instructions for other blojsom owners to do the same, so it probably won't interest most of you. I'd like to remind my readers who use WordPress that the same functionality can be achieved by installing the Google Sitemaps Generator for WordPress, which I use all the time on my other blogs.

A New Flavor

At first I thought I'd have to write a new blojsom plugin in order to get Sitemaps functionality, which is why I put it off for so long. But eventually I had no choice to start the project, as I really needed to have the pages of Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense properly indexed by Google.

Anyhow, I was learning how to build blojsom plugins when it occurred to me that I was doing it all wrong: I could achieve the same thing much more easily with a new blojsom flavor. Hence the “sitemap” flavor was born. Access this URL:

http://www.memwg.com/blog/adsense/?flavor=sitemap

And you'll see a Google Sitemap for the blog.

Creating the Sitemap Flavor

Adding the sitemap flavor is trivial. In your blog's directory (usually WEB-INF/blog-name) there are two files to modify. Add the following line to flavor.properties:

sitemap=sitemap.vm, text/xml;charset=UTF-8

Similarly, add this line to plugin.properties:

sitemap.blojsom-plugin-chain=string-utilities, all-entries

These changes define a new flavor, “sitemap”, that ends up running the Velocity file “sitemap.vm” after first running the “string-utilities” and “all-entries” plugins. You'll need to restart the blojsom webapp before continuing.

The Velocity Sitemap Template

We're almost done. In the blog's templates directory you need to create sitemap.vm with the following contents:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="gss.xsl"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84">

 <url>
   <loc>$BLOJSOM_BLOG.getBlogURL()</loc>
   <priority>1.0</priority>
   <changefreq>hourly</changefreq>
 </url>
#foreach ($entry in $BLOJSOM_PLUGIN_ALL_ENTRIES)
 #DatelessFriendlyPermalink($entry)

 <url>
   <loc>$BLOJSOM_PLUGIN_STRING_UTILITIES.escapeString($entryLink)</loc>
   <lastmod>#FormatDate($entry "yyyy-MM-dd")</lastmod>
   <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
   <priority>0.5</priority>
 </url>
#if ($BLOJSOM_COMMENTS_ENABLED.booleanValue() &&
$entry.supportsComments() &&
( $entry.getNumComments() > 0 ) && ($entry.getMetaData() &&
!$entry.getMetaData().containsKey("blog-entry-comments-disabled")))

 <url>
   <loc>$BLOJSOM_PLUGIN_STRING_UTILITIES.escapeString("$entryLink?page=comments")</loc>
   <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
   <priority>0.1</priority>
 </url>
#end
#end

</urlset>

This template is actually very simple. First, it creates a <url> block for the blog root, in this case http://www.memwg.com/blog/adsense/. Then it loops through all the blog entries (added to the flavor's context via the “all-entries” plugin) and adds <url> blocks for each blog entry and, for the entries with comments, each comment page.

Once the sitemap.vm file is created you should be able to access your sitemap using the URL:

http://www.yourdomain.com/blog/blogname/?flavor=sitemap

The Sitemaps Index

We're almost done. Although the sitemap we generate is valid, it's in the wrong spot. The Sitemaps protocol requires you to place the sitemaps file at the root of your site. Rather than moving it, though, we can cheat and use a “sitemap index” file to refer to it instead. For example, this is the sitemap index for memwg.com:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<sitemapindex xmlns="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84">
  <sitemap>
    <loc>http://www.memwg.com/blog/adsense/?flavor=sitemap</loc>
  </sitemap>
</sitemapindex>

If you had multiple blogs running on the same site, you'd add a block for each sitemap. You could also create a sitemap for the non-blog pages and add it here as well.

You can now submit your sitemap to Google.

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Eric Giguere wrote Make Easy Money with Google, which is not the spammy get-rich book you might think it is, and is about to release (finally) Uncommon AdSense, a book aimed at more experienced AdSense publishers. And no, it won't be overpriced.

I'm trying to do a little maintenance on the blogging software I use to run this blog. For historical reasons, I use blojsom, although most of my other blogs are done using WordPress. Unfortunately, blojsom simply isn't as well-supported as WordPress, which means I haven't been able to find an equivalent to the Google Sitemap Generator for WordPress, although in honesty I could have gotten off my butt and written one myself. And I have, sort of, but that's a different post. There's now an official sitemap.xml file for this site that's been submitted to Google and hopefully will fix some of the wonkiness that's happened with this blog. That's what I want to talk about in this post: using Google Sitemaps to better index your blog or site.

What is a Google Sitemap?

You probably understand what a sitemap is, and it's something I recommend that each site have. A sitemap is just an HTML file that lists all the pages (or all the major pages) of your site. It's a simple way for both humans and search engines to find the other pages on your site.

In June of 2005, however, Google took the sitemap concept further and introduced Google Sitemaps, which is now part of Google's expanded set of Google Webmaster Tools.

A Google Sitemap is like a regular sitemap, except it's not HTML. It's in XML format, which looks a lot like HTML except that the tags are different. Here's a very simple sitemap for one of my sites:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84">
  <url>
    <loc>http://www.NoDebtIsGood.com/</loc>
    <priority>1.0</priority>
    <changefreq>daily</changefreq>
  </url>
</urlset>

Create a file like this called sitemap.xml at the root of your site or blog and add a <url> entry for each page you want indexed by Google. (Yahoo! and MSN will soon be supporting this format, too, by the way. You can find out more at Sitemaps.org, the new site for the common Sitemaps format.) All the gory details are found on Using the Sitemap Protocol.

Why Use Google Sitemaps?

So why use Google Sitemaps if you already have a perfectly good HTML sitemap? There are different reasons. One is completeness. Your human-readable sitemap may not list every page on your site in order to prevent information overload and also to avoid being flagged by the search engines for excessive linking. Another reason is that they provide more information about the page — how often it updates, when it was last updated, how important it is relative to other pages — than a simple link provides.

A really good reason, though, is to help deal with site mishaps. Say you've got pages accessible via a number of different URLs, possibly because you screwed up the configuration of the site once or twice. With a proper Sitemap you can “normalize” the site by providing Google with the list of “real” URLs and then taking steps to redirect all the other URLs to the normalized version. (This may or may not be simple to do, though.)

Supplemental Index Hell

Another reason to use Google Sitemaps is to get out of Google's supplemental index and back into the main index. The supplemental index where misbehaving pages go, although the Google Webmaster FAQ doesn't put it so kindly. Google likes to index those bad pages for completeness, but avoids exposing them to searchers unless absolutely necessary. It's like being in Limbo, the first circle of Hell.

Sometimes you get into the supplemental index by accident more than anything. Having duplicate pages is one way. Having confused URL structures is another. This blog's been in supplemental hell for a while now, but I was just too lazy (again) to do anything about it. The new sitemap for the site to normalize the URL structure is my first step in jumping back to the main index. I'm not expecting that a sitemap by itself will do this, I'll also need to fix the ways the blog entries link to each other, put some nofollows on certain links, and noodle with the robots.txt file. But hopefully I'll be able to make the transition within a month or two.

If you're running a site and are having problems getting properly indexed, try building and submitting a sitemap. A good place to start is with the Sitemaps FAQ.

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Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. If you like this posting, why not link to his blog or bookmark it as one of your favorites?