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Blogger Magic - Identifying The Blog

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Identifying Blogger blogs, as with identifying people, is an exercise in futility - or at least, complexity. As a person, you are addressed in number of ways, which will be contextually significant. Depending upon how / where you live, you may have:
  1. First name.
  2. Last name.
  3. Nickname (one, or many).
  4. Government identifier ("Social Security Number", and others).
  5. Home address.
  6. Business address.
  7. "Phone" number. How many phones do you have?
  8. Email address. How many email addresses do you have?
  9. SMS address (which may or may not be same as one or more "phone" numbers).
  10. Website address. How many websites do you publish?
  11. I'm not going to take all day writing this - give me a break!

Your blog has a number of ways of addressing it, too - and it may be to your benefit to consider each identifier, canonically.

Some identifiers are provided by Blogger, others by us - and some represent a joint effort.
If you think of the search engines as "government" agencies (the search engines surely tax our patience), your blog has a "social security" number too. Built into the blog header, you'll find the "canonical" tag.

Here's the header for this blog.
<head>

...

<link href='http://blogging.nitecruzr.net/' rel='canonical'/>
<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" 
title="The Real Blogger Status - Atom"
href="http://blogging.nitecruzr.net/feeds/posts/default" />
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml"
title="The Real Blogger Status - RSS"
href="http://blogging.nitecruzr.net/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss" />
<link rel="service.post" type="application/atom+xml" title="The Real Blogger Status - Atom" href="http://www.blogger.com/feeds/24069595/posts/default" />

...

</style>

There it is
link href='http://blogging.nitecruzr.net/' rel='canonical'/

With a Blogger blog, the canonical tag will always equal the published URL of the blog. When you setup a sitemap, you'll use the published URL in the sitemap. And, you setup a sitemap for a Blogger blog, using Google Webmaster Tools - and the Webmaster Tools entry for the blog will, likewise, be identical to the published URL.

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Comments

Other Mary said…
I'm trying to see if I can leave a comment here, per you suggestion to my log in quesiton.
29/8/11 18:49
Kate said…
I had never thought of it like this before. This is very helpful.
Wordsmith
http://wordsdropoutoftime.blogspot.com/
31/8/11 09:06
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