Making iWeb Blogs searchable by Google

Rick...

Actually, Google will index your pages just fine. I have several blog entries that show up in the Google searches. Even the text that is rendered as an image will be found by Google.... really. What I have found with blog entries is that the main thing Google keys in on is the blog entry title. The URLs that iWeb generates for pages are actually very valid and are intended to provide uniqueness to each entry. There is nothing wrong with the URLs and Google indexes them just perfectly.

Click here to see my Google-indexed pages

Getting Google to index your pages has nothing to do with what is on your pages or what the URL looks like. It's just a matter of providing links from already indexed pages to your new URL. So posting your URL in this forum, for example, will provide this bridge to your site and the rest of your pages will follow. You can also submit your site URL to Google yourself...

http://www.google.com/addurl

I hope this info helps.

1) The reason I want to know how to convert my post
from an image of the text to actual text is because
the content itself is worth gold.

There is no doubt that content is king here. But when Google indexes pages, it does not care whether something is being rendered as an image or text. What Google is scanning is the HTML...and the text is all there...word for word... in the HTML. Of course, Google is smart enough to tell whether the tags are for images or for text...and it's possible that your blog entry as a whole gets filed under "images" instead of "web pages" on Google's search categories.

But here is the bottomline answer for your problem... if you want to prevent iWeb from converting your text to an image... Make sure that you don't make any change from the default text style/font/color/etc. I have never had a problem with text-to-image on my site when I have just clicked in the text boxes and typed in my text. Change the font, though, and all bets are off. The same goes for drop shadows, inline images, rotation, underlining, bolding, etc, etc, etc. You get the idea.

2) A unique URL is what I want but I would like a
unique URL with my own titles and not a serie of
numbers. Why? Because the way the search engines
work, specifically at google, if I have the term
"triple bottom line" in the body of my blog I get a
specific weight in ranking. If the term is also in
the title of the URL i get an even higher weight in
ranking.

I'm not convinced of this fact really, but I'll take your word for it. I think Google takes particular interest in page titles and other coded headings....much more so than the actual URL. Of course, all other content being equal....sure why not...I'd give the nod to a descriptive URL if possible.

So here's a possible solution for you... Have a look at this program called "jTemplate".... http://www.jinx.de/jTemplate.html
I have used this program to fix blog entry ordering problems....and it just works. Amazing stuff. Download it, launch it, and look under the "Blog entries" menu. There is a selection for "Rename" that will purportedly do what you want.

I've been waiting for someone to take the plunge on this one, so if you try it you must let me know how it goes. Like I said, I let it work on one of my domains with screwed up blog navigation....and it worked amazingly well.

re # 2 - I tried the jtemplate but it did not work
for the blog entries. It only worked for non-blog
entries which is not what I needed. Oh well I guess
we all have to hold out breath for version 2.0

Really? I thought the feature was made specifically for blog entries. I mean, it is under the "Blog entries" menu. Hmm....

By the way. I am moving my hosting to a non .mac
account. Is there any other tool other that would
work with my "publish" button in iWeb to make it
instead publish to my server?

I'm afraid that the only alternative in this case would be to use the "Publish to Folder" option. Then use your favorite FTP program to upload to your server space. Captain FTP actually has some file syncing capability, so you might use this to replace much of the incremental update feature from .Mac (publish updated pages only).