Yes... The ongoing adventures of the GoogleTard. I wanted to share with the n00b's on this topic mainly, but I know my good friends who are in the Google Cult will laugh a bit. With me I hope I am not a fan of Google. Some of you that have followed my threads (like... yeah right) and you know this it is personal not business. They OWE me man! So I take as much from them as I can without any intention of giving back. Very humble guy that I am. Anyway. They are an object of worship amongst the believers. As has been written... "When in Rome, do as the Roman's do", and so I deal with Google reluctantly. They are after all a "false" idol of the Internet Kingdom. I'm in maps to start my first topic on the subject. There could be debate as to whether a spider (those little search engine crawlers) actually requires a sitemap anymore. They have been morphing into semi-lifelike creatures over the years. One day they will hopefully pay me my lost adsense revenue personally, but I digress. You need a sitmap.xml file to verify your existence with Google. I have tried numerous free and open-source sitemap creators. If your site is small with only a few pages, then these little babies will do the trick. If you have a really large site, or a CMS (content Management System) or Wordpress, Joomla, etc. you have many extra files of code that support your site. Freebie sitemap creators will not do. I use a product called A1 Sitemap Generator. This company has numerous applications for us webmasters, this is one of my favorites. They are at this address http://www.microsystools.com/products/sitemap-generator/ if you care to investigate. It puts out a very complete and accurate mapping of every detail of your site. One click two clicks... Done. Very useful tool. Alright, so what is the "Tard" in GoogleTard all about. Well, I'm a Tard... Glad to meet you! Let me tell you what I did and hopefully you never do this yourself. Last year I busted a hump doing the SEO bag on my radio station website http://yourockradio.com I did well, lots of organic traffic (from search engines) and #1 position on the page for my keywords. Nice, huh? But then I did a Bozo no-no. Google asks you to verify your site with either a "meta" tag (code on your web page), or a dummy html page with some numbers on it. You must do that to even be recognized as the owner of that website. What happened was I did some "spring cleaning". I had lots of ghost turds and stuff with files I didn't need. Clean it up then! OK. But I deleted that dummy file. Wrong answer Bubba! My site disappeared from every page on the search. I was freaking out man! I checked to see if I was banned, I could not imagine why that would happen. I talk a lot of crap about Google, thought they may have been bitchslappin' me. Not the case. I Tardded out. The moral to the story is... Get a sitemap going on and get verified. Don't forget to transfer your meta tag if you do a redesign, and/or don't delete the dummy html file. Don't be a GoogleTard! (All of this activity can be done at the Webmaster section at iGoogle.com)