Google sitemaps says that it's got 24 pages from my sitemap and 3 of those are in its index, when I check to see what it's got in its index (because I thought it had nothing) - it has nothing. It must have index some page, but decided not to publish them yet. This is very interesting, watching what Google's doing in real-time (ish) and being directly involved. When I been involved in submitting other people's websites. it been a case of submnitting them, and then forgetting about them. It's much different when I'm directly involved and actually wanting to get some traffic, and wanting to get it quickly.

My steps so far have been:

• Submit it
• Create and register a sitemap

My next step wil  be to add a link from a site that's already in Google's index (with a modest PR of 3)

I checked Google and the sitemap had errors in it. It looks like it was showing the original domain I registered www.debt-free-in-2008.com instead of the current url www.debt-free-in-a-year.com which i think is more generic and will eliminate the possibility of other people registering the domain name with future years in the name.

Hopefully this post will update the sitemap with the proper URL.

That didn't do it, so I deleted the sitemap file and updating this post to see if that fixes it.

Now trying a different filename for the sitemap file

That worked, so I'm now of to point Google at the new sitemap.

I'm still at a loss to know why the oroginal file found the old sitename and how it's not being updated to the new name, although a differently named sitemap file uses the new site name. I did try deleting the incorrect sitemap, but that didn't sort it, so I can only put ti down to something between using a previous version of the pug-in, or using a previous name, and it (or me) has become confused.

I'm a Plonker

It turns out I was seeing a cached version of the sitemap in my browser. I discovered this when I deleted the sitemap and re-entered it's address in my browser and I still saw the sitemap, even though the file didn't exist. Once I refreshed the browser and realised the file was now gone, I set the filename back to what it should be, edited a post so the sitemap was updated and when I tested it, the problem was sorted. I've re-submitted it to Google, so hopefully when it sees an updated sitemap it'll speed up the process of adding the site to it's index (there's nothing there yet)

This category is to make public the tasks i have set myself to do. By doing this, you can help hold me accountable for completing them.

Starter Site Tasks

• Complete setup of Adsense and display in site (awaiting Google account setup) 24/1/08
• Improve SEO settings on site – fix categories descriptions, page titles and meta tags
• Submit site to Google and Dmoz 15/1/08
  
• Setup new Amazon account 14/1/08
  
• Fix Amazon links - current version fo graffiti doesn't support this, logged it as a feature request 14/1/08
• Apply SEO techniques to site and start applying to posts
• Get some links, preferably from site with a decent PR

Bigger Tasks

• Chase money owed
• Try and make a claim against accountant
• Move to a new interest free credit card