The Delisting

In switching hosting providers, this website/blog/whatever you would like to call it displayed a single image with the phrase, “I’ll add something here eventually,” and the search engine almighty removed this page from the face of the Internet.  From what I can tell, I shut down the blog on 7/6/2008.  The web crawlers last access to this pages was on 6/10/2008 which seems correct since I haven’t updated anything since April.

Early Sunday morning on 8/3/2008 I googled my name and didn’t find what I was looking for.  So, I restored this site.  So, we’ll see how long it takes to become listed once again.

On a more useful note, there’s a Wordpress plugin called Google XML Sitemaps that generates a skeleton of your blog and more importantly, broadcast(s) your latest posting to search engines.  Once you installed the plugin, you’ll have to goto the Wordpress Dashboard Settings and select the XML-Sitemap link.  From there you can initiate the first build of your sitemap.

Once that’s done, you’ll get a success page stating you the major search engines out there have been notified.

The process creates a sitemap.xml file which resides on the root directory of your website.  For completeness, you can go into Google’s webmaster tools and also add the site map.

1. Sign into Google’s webmaster tools.
2. Choose your site from the dashboard.
3. Click on the sitemaps link on the left.
4. Click Add a Sitemap.
5. In the Choose Type drop-down select Add General Sitemap.
6. In the My sitemap URL is field type sitemap.xml
7. Click the Add General Sitemap button.