Google Sitemaps

You can use the method I suggested above. It is about 10 seconds worth of work after setup.

 

Great find, NC...

Someone on another forum was just asking if there was anything like this available...

 

Why does it take so long for Google to download the sitemap, is it because it is a manual process?

 

Just an FYI. For those of you using Blogger, you can submit your atom feed as a site map.

 

http://www.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=296051

There you go for your phpbb people. I'm still stuck trying to figure out a solution for this that works with my mod rewrite.

 

Googles76 - DL of the XML file must be a batch process.

 

Looks like Google doesn't update the sitemap status very frequently. I just checked and it says submitted: 4 hours ago, and downloaded: 4 hours ago, yet when I checked it about 30min ago it still said status is pending. Now will see how fast the goole bot comes , I need it very much because of complete overhaul of my site.

 

I setup the sitemap script to generate a new sitemap at 4am every nite and submit it. So far google seems to download it every day at 1pm. They crawled 1/3 of my site the first day and about a third every day afterwards. I haven't seen any more pages indexed but that will probably take a couple days. Im pretty excited.

 

I submitted 4 sitemaps to Google and it downloads them three times a day .

 

It may download them, but they still haven't crawled one of my sites and added the new pages to the index yet. They've been downloading my sitemap repeatedly since I set up the sitemap last Sunday, yet I haven't seen any of the new pages that I added now show up in the index in almost a week. Anyone else run into this?

Ian

 

Hmm this is cool. Main advantage I can see is for sites whose freshness > their pagerank->crawl frequency. I.e. you have a news site or blog with about 14 posts/week, but is only being crawled 3 times a week.

It's basically like technorati's ping.

I don't think a cron job is the solution... what you should try to do is setup a manual ping in the admin section of your site that generates a new sitemap and submits it to Google, that you initiate whenever you add or update significant content.

 

yes.......sitemaps are very important

 

Thanks for sharing, pachecus.

However, this thread is actually about Google Sitemaps Beta, not about sitemaps in general...

 

just checked my site: on google, and they just indexed 250 more pages

 

It doesn't appear to me that it has helped me much after 4 days after submitting but maybe it takes longer.

 

I'm beginning to wonder if this is anything more the Superstition 101...

 

Thank you NewComputer

 

To sum everything up, if anyone wants to go at it manually, here is how the sitemap layout looks like:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84 http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84/sitemap.xsd">
<url>
    <loc>http://www.yourbaseurl.com</loc>
    <priority>1.0</priority>
  </url>
  
<url>
<loc>http://www.yourbaseurl.com/index.htm</loc>
<changefreq>changefreq=monthly</changefreq>
<priority>priority=1.0</priority>
</url>

<url>
<loc>http://www.yourbaseurl.com/page.htm</loc>
<changefreq>changefreq=monthly</changefreq>
<priority>priority=0.1</priority>
</url>

</urlset>

Code (markup):

than just keep repeating:

<url>
<loc>http://www.yourbaseurl.com/page.htm</loc>
<changefreq>changefreq=monthly</changefreq>
<priority>priority=0.1</priority>
</url>

Code (markup):

for all your pages you want to map. There are also other options you can put in such as lastupdated but I didn't find that too usefull. The priority is a value from 1.0 to 0.1 with 1.0 carrying the most importance and 0.1 carrying the least.

 

I love the sitemaps, did anyone have success with them

 

It looks like it's working for me..

I submitted a couple of sitemaps 1 to 2 days ago, and googlebot is all over the site now.
Been almost zero googlebot activity this month until now..