using sitemaps just for diagnostics

Excuse my ignorance, I have never cared for sitemaps, 'cause it was too much trouble. ...but I saw a few screenshots lately and I'd like to ask the experts here, whether it is possible to use them just to see what was crawled when, if there were errors, etc. I mean, I do not want to create and maintain a list of urls, I just want to know when there is a problem.

Thanks

 

That should work fine I see some a bunch of 404 for pages that I moved. Those pages where never in my sitemap.xml so google shows info about all your pages that it crawls for that site.

 

I think google with their sitemap programs will show you info about your site problem

 

Thats what i do for one of my sites. I don't bother with the urls as google doesn't add it to the index anyway. I just use it to see what problems google sees , in particuliar the 404 errors it encounters.

 

Sitemaps works well to track 404 and other errors. Depending on the amount of and type of content it can be extremely useful.

I've had a couple instances that even with manually created links and content, I've fouled up the urls and had to 301 a bunch of pages but I probably wouldn't have caught them all without the sitemap error report.

Of course you need to post a sitemap for this to work.

 

Find a sitemap creation service to do it for you, there are plenty of free ones out there and some of us even notify Google when they are uploaded to your site. It certainly beats doing it by hand and the online services mean that you don't have to download or install anything.

Even if all you do is create the Google sitemap account, you'll see stats on your site... you will need to upload a file to your server or add their 'verification' code to your meta tags so that they will show you stats... (you couldn't add my URL to your Google account because they won't show stats until the code is added)

 

If you are serious about your site, then you should use the Google Site Map. The errors alone, will help you gain PR by finding internal navigation and/or linking errors. It will also show you trends or global bugs that you can fix quickly.

As for creating the Site Map all the time. That is not needed but helps. For the first 6 months I just used a TXT file version because I didn't know how to the the XML version. And I got very good results.

Now I use both methods. The main one (XML) is just the primary page tree and the TXT version is what I have changed or trying to get indexed faster.

The site maps don't have to be complete on done every day. Once a month would get you to a good 90% and let Google do the rest.

Good luck. It really does help you to use the site map.

Jim Catanich
www.catanich.com