Yay!  Aaron Pettigrew and I have figured out a work-around to get these blogs indexed, and thus findable, by the major blog search engines.  Last week I checked and was dismayed to discover that posts here were not appearing in Technorati, Google Blogsearch, Yahoo Blogsearch or several other key blog search engines.  For some reason the blogging software we are using wasn't "pinging" the search engines to let them know when we had new content posted.    No one knew why this wasn't happening.  It was a problem.

Not anymore.  What we did was this:  I set Feedburner.com to republish a second version of the RSS feed for the Net2  blogs and used their Pingshot settings to automatically ping all the most important ping servers online whenever anyone makes a new post here.  This was not hard to do and  the advantages of having your feed go through Feedburner are almost innumerable.  We didn't want to do a lot with Feedburner for this feed in particular, we just wanted to automate pinging.

The next step was a little more complicated.  In order for the search engines to believe your message that there is new content (your ping) they need to be able to latch on to some proof that the blog they are supposed to indexed and the ping they received come from the same source.  (I really don't understand why this part works, just that it does.)  So Aaron added a line of code to the site's header tags that was just like the native RSS feed, only linking to the Feedburner feed as well.  This was an act of pure heroism, in fact, as the blogging software we are using doesn't easily allow you to add things to your header tags.  Aaron figured out how to do it and now we are rockin' the blog search space like never before!

If you have a blog that you want to make sure shows up in blog search results (a significant source of visibility), you too can use Feedburner to republish your RSS feed.  The best thing about Feedburner is that it can show you how many active subscribers your feed has, which is very nice.  Oh and there's so much more...but for now we just needed it to do one thing, and judging by the test searches I've been doing this morning it is working quite nicely.

TagCentral Tags: pinging, blogging, RSS, blog_search, search, Feedburner