How should google crawl my blog?

Question

I was wondering how (or if) I should guide Googlebot through my blog. Should I only allow visiting pages with single entries or should it also crawl the main page (which also has full entries)? My concern is that the main page changes when I add a new post and google keeps the old version for some time. I also find directing people to the main page annoying - you have to look through all the post before you find the one you're interested in. So what is the proper way to solve this issue?

Answer 1

Make a sitemap.xml and regenerate it periodically. Check out Google Webmaster Tools.

Answer 2

Why not submit a sitemap with the appropriate <changefreq> tags -- if you set that to "always" for the homepage, the crawler will know that your homepage is very volatile (and you can have accurate change freq for other URLs too, of course). You can also give a lower priority to your homepage and a higher one to the pages you prefer to see higher in the index.

I do not recommend telling crawlers to avoid indexing your homepage completely, as that would throw away any link juice you might be getting from links to it from other sites -- tweaking change freq and priority seems preferable.