Getting Listed on Google Blog Search

Google announced its new beta blog search service this week, and I immediately went to check it out.  To my dismay, none of my AI3 blog posts were listed!  $#%&*#

My first hint of what to do came from the About Google Blog Search page, which indicated that while Google does not yet have a submission form for submitting pings, the new service does monitor updating services, specifically mentioning Weblogs.com.  I then tried to access this site, which was slower than molasses and I timed out many times (I suspect many others were following the same path I was).

That got me into a whole investigation of ping and ping success in general with my WordPress installation.  (See my earlier post on Pings and Trackbacks).  I was alarmed to discover that many of my ping locations had not been updating well, for reasons that still remain somewhat murky (though others have noted sporadic miscues by WordPress in ping updates, not to mention some of the ping update sites recommended for it such as Ping-o-matic).

The WordPress dashboard suggested that Google was using Ping-o-matic as one of its update services for new listings, so I manually submitted my site again to Ping-o-matic and waited to see the results.  Voila!   After a reasonable hour or so delay, I found my posts and sites now on the Google blog search service and other locations.

Thus, in the interim before Google completes its submission expansions, I recommend that WordPress bloggers who are not yet listed in the Google blog search:

1. Occasionally manually ping Ping-o-matic rather than rely that your updates are being handled automatically (but, DON’T do it too frequently since that  can be interpreted as spamming behavior)
2. On a one-time basis, up your synidcation feeds limit on the Options-Reading-Syndication Feeds panel in the dashboard to be large enough to include All of your desired recent postings
3. Manual submit an update at Ping-o-matic, and
4. Return the syndicated feeds number to your original amount in your dashboard.

With this simple approach, I can now happily report that all of the AI3 listings are now in the new Google blog search service, and so can yours!