Google Sitemaps

[Allfetish]

http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login

I'm curious what experiences others have had with this. I submitted a simple sitemap with a listing of urls for one of my sites. What I noticed was that the googlebot seemed to crawl a bit more often than it used to. It seems like a wonderful tool to help with efficient crawling. Particular if you actually set up a XML sitemap using all the features.

However, I ahve also heard complaints from people who have said after submitting a map they actually lost their listings. So far nothing like this happened to me. I am curious what expoeriences others have had?

[RawAlex]

The jury is still out. I have seen some good things on test, and I have just noticed something that could also be very ugly. More news soon.

Alex

[kit]

There is no relation with actual rankings yet. Possbile a little "+" to one of the dozens parameters used Google for the page ranking.

[Allfetish]

Originally Posted by RawAlex

The jury is still out. I have seen some good things on test, and I have just noticed something that could also be very ugly. More news soon.

Alex

Sounds interesting. I was reading someones blog where they did a study with 3 sites to check on any effects and I noticed a mixed result with it. For sure as kit said, I don't think it has much impact on the rankings or the PR. The only thing I've heard that it MAY help with is getting the spider to see some of your pages and/or index the most frequently updated ones more often.

The forum they have there is definately interesting to read as well. And if nothing else, its great to get some extra stats about your site from google.

[RawAlex]

I am using it to clear up some domains that google has had a hard time processing for one reason or another. The system already revealed something to me that I think will bring positive results to everything I own, which is a plus.

The downside is that if you own more than one domain, you may be revealing information on relationships between sites that google has not previously sussed out, which may lead to some sort of penalty if you cross link to yourself too much.

Personally, I think that putting up a sitemap may be a sign of willingness to work with Google, and perhaps they may treat sitemapped sites as "somewhat more friendly".

As I said, the jury is still out. I have maybe 10 domains total in their game, and I am watching them closely.

Alex

[Mattinblack]

Dont think google accepts them. I have a site with loads of subdomains and thought 'great - heres a tool I can use' then found it complained about it and said I should have one sitemap per subdomain.

[RawAlex]

Google (and most other search engines) treat subdomains as different sites. You would need to build a sitemap for each one seperate.

Alex

[Mr. Stiff]

I think it's a great tool, especially after they've changed the GUI. You can now see pagerank spreading (low,normal,high) and some cool crawler stats.

Noticed the bot comming to my site more frequent and new items are picked up much faster. Their 'ping' feature is great.

In my believe Google will use this tool to have realtime data exchange in the future. If CNN publishes an article at 09:00, google will show it at 09:01. But yourpornsite.com won't get any benefits I think..

[mygem]

How does it work for new sites? I just uploaded a new site and added it to my site maps. Will Google add it to their cache quicker than if I had added a link elsewhere?

Any ideas?

[RawAlex]

The funny part about the "pagerank spread" is that I have a domain where it put most of the pages as normal, and yet none of those pages have made it into the SERPs or into the cache. Truly stunning.

mygem, I think that the only potential benefit is that instead of waiting for google to discover your site by itself, you can guide it in the door. I have a feeling (not entirely proven yet) that this might also be helpful in getting inside pages noticed much more quickly. However, I have seen nothing to suggest that it gives any major advantage.

Alex

[PR_Tom]

Are you using the sitemap generator script they suggest? Or a simple text file?

I'd like to try it out, but don't want to go nuts.

[RawAlex]

I wrote my own for some things, and I use a plug in for wordpress to do those sites. You can do it with a simple text file, but remember that you will want to update it occassionally to show the new pages and to show that you actually do update your site

Alex

[Mattinblack]

Its a simple XML file... took me about 2 mins for each of my sites to make one and upload it. Google is friendly about how you submit - it helpfully tells you a few hours later whether there are any errors and where you made em so you can resubmit. Quick tutorial...

Cut and paste this (one of mine) into notepad. Change URL's to yours.
The lastmod dates are in US format but as you can see are NOT compulsory. The priority numbers also are not compulsory but if you dont assign it it assigns as 0.5. Just make your most important page a 1
and the least maybe a 0.3. In the change frequency tag you can have
never yearly monthly daily hourly .... just be sensible! To add more URL's just copy a <url></url> block. Make sure you closing tags on every thing </loc></url> and that you didnt overwrite the </urlset> at the end....

When you are done save the file as 'sitemap.xml' and upload it then submit!

Easy.
=======Cut Below this line ===================

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84">

<url>
<loc>http://ukescort.kwikfire.com/index.html</loc>
<lastmod>2005-10-10</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.3</priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://ukescort.kwikfire.com/uk-escorts-by-location.html</loc>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://ukescort.kwikfire.com/new-escorts.html</loc>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
<priority>1.0</priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://ukescort.kwikfire.com/4-escorts.html</loc>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://ukescort.kwikfire.com/4-punters.html</loc>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
</url>
</urlset>

===========And above this one!================

[mygem]

Thanks very much for that, it made life a lot easier for those of us who are not xml savvy!

[Mattinblack]

No probs mygem... always happy to help if it costs me less than ten mins of my time... else I charge,...lol

[PR_Tom]

Cool yeah, I read up on it at the sitemaps info pages. I'll write a script I think, so that when I update my pages, it updates the map too.

One thing though, didnt it say you should urlencode the links? In your sample, you dont have any special characters like & or > etc.. But if you do, you should encode them, correct?

[Mattinblack]

yep thats right ..... but I was assuming a simple static site! When I write a site like strange attractor I make it so the site updates 4-5 times an hour, that way when it gets crawled the search engine stands some chance of retrieving a valid set of links. Problem is when you use PHP etc the search engine will ONLY visit the coding that you give it on the sitemap. My sitemap for SA has only the two top pages in it cos I know that the rest will get crawled but if you are using a dynamic site then you may have to submit thousands of URL's to cover all possibilities if thats what you want.

anyhow if your urls have codes in you should use:
" &quot;
> &gt;
< &lt;
& &amp;
' &apos;

Or so they say.

[neveremail]

Originally Posted by Mr. Stiff

I think it's a great tool, especially after they've changed the GUI. You can now see pagerank spreading (low,normal,high) and some cool crawler stats.

Regarding the PageRank, if its anything like toolbar PR then I assume it will be a poor representation of what is really going on.