Is this normal for a new site?

[fsa3]

I just got my site up and running and created my sitemap for google. What's wierd is that I notice that googlebot is only spidering the following urls:

/blogs/default - My blog page (that I've submitted to some blog sites)

/robots.txt (404)

/sitemap.xml.gz

However it doesn't spider any of the links from sitemap.xml.gz or the ones off of /blogs/default.

Does this make sense for a new site? Should google be following the links off of /blogs/default?

[MHes]

What type of links are you using?

[fsa3]

An anchor href to the full domain URL.

E.g.

<a href="http://mysite.com">MySite</a>

[tedster]

Although it's not probably causing your trouble, it is still best practice to include the trailing slash:

<a href="http://example.com/">MySite</a>

Does your index page have any inbound links? That is, knowing what link happy folks bloggers are, is it possible that the only IBLs are to your blog?

[fsa3]

Well thats kind of my question if I point all my inbound links from OTHER sites to my blog page, then my blog page has links to other pages on my site will google crawl/index the other pages on my site?

[tedster]

I would definitely suggest getting a few links to the domain itself, and not just deep links to the blog. Can't say exactly what would happen with Google, because I've never had this scenario on my hands. But I'd say your current situation of no crawling the index page is enough reason to do the conventional thing and get some links.

[shri]

A *new* site typically does not have the quality factors that prompt a deep crawl.

These factors include PR and a range of links.

When I've launched a new site, I make sure of the following factors:

1) Quality content: No dupe content for sure. This is checked with Copyscape. We want to ensure that google does not hit a dupe content in its initial crawls.

2) Quality links: Both to the home page (initially more to the home page) and deep (only after its been indexed by the major engines).

Once you have the two sorted out, you'll notice that the frequency and crawl depth will increase. Eventually around a solid PR5-6 you'll notice that you're in the daily crawl -- which is where you can start experiments like tweaking titles / h1 etc.. :)