Use Google Site Maps? Better Read This

If you’re using Google’s new sitemap feature then make darn sure you read all the information.

If you don’t there’s a good chance you won’t do it correctly.

If you’ve used the Google sitemaps, you may know that you can ping their server directly.

A program I use, Gsitemap, will also notify Google that your sitemap is ready.

Until you’re fully competent in using the sitemaps you should let Google know through their system.

Here’s why.

I uploaded 3 correctly formatted sitemaps yesterday. If it wasn’t for uploading them through Google, I’d have been waiting, and then concluding that it didn’t seem to work.

To make things worse, I could have tried it out on 100 domains and still have no result.

Why?

I uploaded my sitemap to http://www.thedomainname.com/sitemap/google.xml

I figured creating a directory called sitemap would make sense. It would be obvious what it was and wouldn’t clog up my root folder.

Big mistake.

Since I was using software, I didn’t read all the documents thoroughly.

You ever do that?

Fortunately, since I uploaded through Google, it told me there was a problem.
If I put the sitemap in a directory called sitemap then that sitemap is

only good for files in that folder and subfolder.

I would have made a BIG mistake. The pages I thought would be submitted to Google wouldn’t have been.

I’ve resubmitted and the status is OK for all of them now.

Moral: RTFM and put the sitemap in your root directory.

Rick

1. Hi, Rick… seems an obvious thing to do for our sites of concern. I looked into this on Google’s site earlier today, and found their instructions to be challenging on the ‘how-to’. I’ll study what you say here, and then… time to tackle this one. I did RSS the link page via RSS_VP you had already worked on - thank you! A start, I hope the right one.

   You know your stuff, and I’m grateful.

   Scott
   http://www.Copywriting.Net

   Posted by onflyfishing  on  06/29  at  03:29 PM

2. Hi Rick
   You can save yourself lots of trouble by submitting the sitemap the way Google prefers, through the web interface at: http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps . It would have caught that and informed you of the problem.

   Another solution would be to use a better generator, like mine —the GSiteCrawler ( http://johannesmueller.com/gs/ ) will only include URLs which are in or below the level of your main site URL. Also, it has lots of other features (eg. Export your URLs with Title, Description, Keywords for Excel, etc. etc.).

   Cheers,
   John

   Posted by softplus  on  08/07  at  04:30 AM

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