Google Sitemaps

[BishopWeber]

Here is my experience with sitemaps:

Originally Posted by BishopWeber

I used sitemaps in a site and it was not indexed for about 6 or 7 month, not a single page. Then someone told me that becouse of the spam, google deindexed sites using sitemaps, so I take off the sitemap and in a few weeks my site was indexed. May be a coincidence, who knows, google acts in strange ways.

But there is other webmasters using sitemaps without problems.
I think that it's better to use some home made html or xml sitemap pages or just a good navigation scheme based on links.

[virgohippy]

I wrote a little sitemap plugin for one of my sites a while back too. Like the rest, it was to see what happens. I haven't had any problems either, but everything in the sitemap was as "relavent" as I could manage.

Another thing, as BishopWeber pointed out, because of my internal linking structure, and some quality backlinks, a fair amount of my pages were already indexed.

Seems to me that if a page is worth Google's attention (ie, it's not spam), googlebot should have already found it, so a google sitemap isn't worth too much.

Furthermore, if said site is full of spam, and said site spams that spam in a site map of spam, maybe the problem isn't the map to all the spam, but all the spam spamming spam?

[Satan]

Problems are more likely to be down to not understanding a few things about the format and stuff.

Firstly the change frequency tag - apart from the index on a blog dont set it to anything other than monthly. why? Because apparently G keeps track of whether you are lying or not....

Secondly the last updated tag - if you use it and leave it the same then the bot WILL NOT check to see if the page has changed more often than once a year. Do this on the index and nothing will be found. Either keep it up to date or dont use it.

I use it on my biggest site and find it doesnt help much but neither does it hinder. I find it better to write html sitemaps of the abc sort on larger sites - ie

top level sitemap - index - link abc - link-def - link ghi
Next level sitemap - abc - all pages whose titles begin with a, b or c

Then I place a blank gif with the alt tag -"sitemap for (site name)" linked to the sitemap on the index of a seperate site I own with some pagerank on a seperate IP. This way the indexing of the sitemap and sub pages is assured.

[virgohippy]

Originally Posted by Satan

Then I place a blank gif with the alt tag -"sitemap for (site name)" linked to the sitemap on the index of a seperate site I own with some pagerank on a seperate IP. This way the indexing of the sitemap and sub pages is assured.

Now that's an interesting idea. Thanks for the tip Satan.

[DJilla]

Originally Posted by Satan

Problems are more likely to be down to not understanding a few things about the format and stuff.

Firstly the change frequency tag - apart from the index on a blog dont set it to anything other than monthly. why? Because apparently G keeps track of whether you are lying or not....

After first looking into G sitemaps when it was new, the research and commentary at the time was that you were giving G way to much access and insight into your site metrics and that they could (might) be used against you later somehow.

I just thought it wasn't worth the risk and confusion and made my own sitemaps and I agree with the comment that if its worth indexing and g is already at your site then it will find a new page too!