Around 4 hours after submitting the sitemap Google webmaster tools said that it had successfully accessed both the sitemap and robots.txt, but still maintained we were not yet indexed. I've just checked again and we are now indexed! Google insists that it last crawled the blog on August 5th, and the cached version is marked as having been retrieved on 5 Aug 2007 at 10:53:48 GMT.

We currently stand at position 6 on Google.com for the keyword "wwwgurus", but appear to be nowhere in the top 1000 for any other relevant keyphrase. Interestingly the same search reveals that the domain wwwgurus.com was deactivated 0n December 29th 2006 and expired on March 23rd 2007.

I logged into Google webmaster tools this morning and my shiny new blog is now verified. Google is at last now satisfied that I am the owner of a blog I created using the same email address that I had already used to login to Google webmaster central. Hooray! Isn't modern technology wonderful?

However the blog has still not yet been crawled. To help Google in this task I added a sitemap at this point. With a Blogger blog you can't generate a normal sitemap. Instead I clicked the "Add" button in the "Sitemap" column in the Webmaster tools dashboard, and entered the blog's atom feed URL (http://wwwgurus.blogspot.com/atom.xml in this case). Given the apparent inability of Google's systems to talk to each other I'm beginning to wonder whether I should manually add the URL to Google's queue as a belt and braces measure. For now let's forget about that and wait and see what happens.

There is now a single, hopefully relevant, AdSense advertisement placed over on the top right of the page. The one showing at the moment is about an affiliate website. I guess that counts as relevant.

Then I went over to http://www.google.com/adsense and logged into my new AdSense account for the first time. It says in a large font at the top:

Today's Earnings: US$0.00

In smaller print next to that it says "Your payments are currently on hold. Action is required to release payment." Obviously we are currently nowhere near Google's $100 payment threshold, so we'll come back to sort that out later. It does seem like we're in desperate need of some traffic though.