Google Sitemaps, anybody using?

Discreet

Jul 18th 2005, 9:25 am

Is anybody using Google Sitemaps? Had any success/failure with them?

For anybody that isn't aware, Google release a sitemap bot which will read in a sitemap file (in xml format) that lists all the pages on your site and you rank them yourself. It's supposed to help with them crawling your site.

I haven't tried them yet because they're still really new (only 2 months old?), but haven't heard of anything really remarkable about them so far.

Any comments?

Google Sitemaps: Google Sitemaps Home (http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login?sourceid=gsm&subid=us-et-about)

Jester

Jul 18th 2005, 9:36 am

:rolleyes: Is anybody using Google Sitemaps? Had any success/failure with them?

For anybody that isn't aware, Google release a sitemap bot which will read in a sitemap file (in xml format) that lists all the pages on your site and you rank them yourself. It's supposed to help with them crawling your site.

I haven't tried them yet because they're still really new (only 2 months old?), but haven't heard of anything really remarkable about them so far.

Any comments?

Google Sitemaps: Google Sitemaps Home (http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login?sourceid=gsm&subid=us-et-about)

I use it, and when I check the sitemap account page it shows that G is grabbing it every so often. I don't know if it helped, but I do know that it can't hurt. :rolleyes:

J

ResaleBroker

Jul 18th 2005, 9:50 am

Is anybody using Google Sitemaps? Had any success/failure with them?I have noticed an increase in visits from Google's spiders since submitting my XML sitemap.

Shoemoney

Jul 18th 2005, 3:59 pm

<3 <3 <3 the google sitemaps. Getting sites online and indexed within 48 hours rules.

TooHappy

Jul 18th 2005, 4:37 pm

Currently, I only use it for startup sites.

bradley

Jul 18th 2005, 5:46 pm

yes, i'm using the sitemap, and google appears to be downloading it several times a day; and yet it refuses to even acknowledge my site in its index, or ANY backlinks to it

nutjobs!

Shoemoney

Jul 18th 2005, 7:07 pm

yes, i'm using the sitemap, and google appears to be downloading it several times a day; and yet it refuses to even acknowledge my site in its index, or ANY backlinks to it

nutjobs!

you wont get any backlinks but you should see googlebot come visit within a few days

Roman

Jul 18th 2005, 7:15 pm

I used 1 one 1 site about 2 weeks ago, yet only 5 out of 35+ pages are indexed. I used it again for a new site about a week ago, the bot comes around, but I'm not indexed yet.

stickman373

Jul 18th 2005, 7:17 pm

I've just tried it out for my new site that I've launched, we'll see if it helps

Colleen

Jul 18th 2005, 9:15 pm

I plan to test it out myself, seems results are different for everyone. ;)

rossriley

Jul 18th 2005, 10:24 pm

Used it and within a couple of weeks got an extra 180,000 pages indexed that hadn't been discovered before!!!

miko67

Jul 18th 2005, 11:22 pm

I used it on a new *in-the-start-up* wordpress site and it works wonders. All pages indexed and googlebot comes around ever so often.

When Google encourages you to give them a sitemap you'd be a fool not to, that is of course if you consider traffic from google worth anything.

Promoting2

Jul 18th 2005, 11:32 pm

Not much for me, just an increase of visits by the spider. Hopefully some good will come of it very soon.

prowess

Jul 19th 2005, 8:54 am

I used it and went from 56 chached pages to 853 in a week. It worked for me. I an using the sailing version of the php sitemap generator from enerion (sp?). It is linked from goog's pages. I like it so far, not sure if it helps with ranking though.

iskandar

Jul 19th 2005, 8:55 am

yes, get indexed .. but first make sure robots.txt is there

dnolan

Jul 19th 2005, 9:14 am

I just sent one in yesterday on one of our smaller sites as a test. Went from 653 pages in the index to 878 pages in the index. I used a windows based program to generate my XML map. It works pretty good, has a spider that can crawl your site and adds any pages it finds to the list. Seemed to find most of them. Also lets you import your current page list from google as a baseline. Found it off the google sitemap site.

Perrow

Jul 19th 2005, 9:27 am

Went from a little over 300 pages to a little over 1500 for a site thats around 10 months old.

dpak

Jul 19th 2005, 10:39 am

For mine (a new site), the spider seems to come more often, but it's only indexing the first page. Mind you, I've only given it about two weeks, so it may just be a small delay in indexing the rest of the site.

alph

Jul 19th 2005, 10:48 am

Yes, it's a great way to get a brand new domain to be visited by google. Works great for that.

Art

Jul 19th 2005, 11:07 am

I cannot stress how amazingly good Google sitemaps are. If you have a new site, or a large site with a great deal of unindexed content (think 20,000+), go for it!

toocoolforschool

Jul 19th 2005, 9:20 pm

I used it on a site with a ton of content, and googlebot does come around, but I haven't even appeared in the index yet. At this point I'm convinced Google has banned me (for whatever reason) so I'm going to stop worrying about the site they refuse to let in. I just submitted a second one for a new site (sent it in yesterday, it's come around to spider) we'll see if my second site gets in or not.

boohlick

Jul 20th 2005, 6:10 am

Lynn Terry

Jul 20th 2005, 2:06 pm

There's a great little plugin for WordPress if any of you run WP sites. Andre Chaperon has a video tutorial about the free plug-in on his blog that is cool:

http://www.andrechaperon.com/2005/07/google-sitemaps-tutorial/

Hope that's useful for some!

toocoolforschool

Jul 20th 2005, 8:52 pm

How old is your site? Maybe you are using some black hat methods in your site optimization?
Thats why google dont indexed it

Um, no. I don't know what "black hat methods" is and I wouldn't know where to figure out or implement. I switched domain names, moved content to another site, and I think it's penalizing me for duplicate content. It's been almost two months and Google is still showing about 1000 pages from my old site, mostly threads for a forum that no longer exists, and haven't existed for almost two months. For a company that's dominating the world of search engines, sometimes Google can be pretty stupid and clueless.

bradley

Jul 22nd 2005, 1:31 pm

i really feel your pain there toocool - if you manage to sort your situation out, please let me know how you got unbanned!

toocoolforschool

Jul 22nd 2005, 2:35 pm

i really feel your pain there toocool - if you manage to sort your situation out, please let me know how you got unbanned!

I'm trying, man, I'm trying hard, but Google doesn't seem to listen, or if they listen, they just don't give a crap.

WhatiFind

Jul 22nd 2005, 3:01 pm

I just started using Google sitemaps for a new site (build about 3 weeks ago), I'm using the Wordpress Sitemap from Arne Brachhold (http://www.arnebrachhold.de/2005/06/05/google-sitemaps-generator-v2-final), easy to use.

Submitted it to google sitemaps, after a couple of days google started downloading the sitemap. Now Google caches the homepage of the site almost every day, it's not indexing the other pages but the site is fairly new. I'm sure that will come soon.

Overall, I'm pleased with google caching the site frequently.

I'll post more info about my findings if the sitemap will influence search engine rankings.

shareaway

Jul 24th 2005, 5:14 pm

if you're submiting a sitemap index for multiple sitemaps on one site, do you submit just the index, or the index and the sitemaps?

toocoolforschool

Jul 24th 2005, 11:04 pm

if you're submiting a sitemap index for multiple sitemaps on one site, do you submit just the index, or the index and the sitemaps?

Huh? Your index page (main page) should be in the sitemap. You just submit the sitemap. Is that what you're asking?

seoindia

Jul 25th 2005, 12:13 am

How to create sitemap (xml) page for a website. Currently i have the sitemap page in html format too. And also it would be freat if somebody can tell me how do i create rss feed for my website whose all pages are in html

isaiasd2003

Jul 25th 2005, 6:18 pm

I've used and tested sitemap affects, much more, recently after further research. When using sitemaps, G will likely exclude any site with the same ip, etc. Like if you make 2 sites, with somewhat similar content, and even many times without similarity, G will leave out the second one or the one submitted after the first same ip - different site - sitemap submission. Different ips obviously aren't affected in this way, and in many cases are benefitted depended on your ip type, host, title, and all that other crap G makes you do to rank well. Both of which I've experienced the affect of lmao, very painfully I might add. :eek: So I made the mistake of submitting all my sitemaps to G with sites having the same ip, causing 2 of my sites to be left out. The first time I used sitemap submission it worked GREAT! SO GREAT I wanted to submit em all! Though I now know its now in my best favor to submit all of em. So just keep what I said in mind, before doing stuff like I did. :cool:

clpounds

Jul 26th 2005, 12:22 am

I created a sitemap and it worked fairly well. The pages were indexed within a few days after inserting them into the xml file.

fryman

Jul 26th 2005, 12:40 am

When you say "indexed", do you mean totally indexed, with title, description and cache?

clpounds

Jul 26th 2005, 12:57 am

Generally the links are there within a day or two and fully indexed with description and all a couple of days after that.

It was actually quite a nice surprise.

egdcltd

Jul 26th 2005, 9:14 am

I've updated my sitemap twice with Google now. Before I used sitemap, I was usually hovering around 5,500 to 6,500 pages indexed. Now it's gone up to over 9,000.

toocoolforschool

Jul 26th 2005, 11:12 am

What do you guys use to create your xml file?

egdcltd

Jul 26th 2005, 11:59 am

What do you guys use to create your xml file?

I used this tool: http://enarion.net/google/

Jim_Westergren

Jul 26th 2005, 12:03 pm

Yesterday I decied to try it and made 4 XML sitemaps for my bigger sites.

I found a very good site making these maps:

sitemapbuilder.net

Just insert the URL and click. I actually downloaded their free software and it is excellent. Very simple.

Will be interesting to see how it goes, 2 of the sites are new and not yet indexed. Hope this will help.

bobmutch

Jul 26th 2005, 1:01 pm

Lynn Terry: "There's a great little plugin for WordPress if any of you run WP sites. Andre Chaperon has a video tutorial about the free plug-in on his blog that is cool:
Andre has a nice little blog them. Thanks for noting. He has a link here now.
www.skaffe.com/viewCat/83672 (http://www.skaffe.com/viewCat/83672)

toocoolforschool

Jul 26th 2005, 2:46 pm

I used this tool: http://enarion.net/google/

Thanks bro will give it a go. I've been using sitemapspal.com but it's a pretty weak xml builder -- basically just links on the main page, it never travels beyond.

toocoolforschool

Jul 26th 2005, 3:09 pm

Damn, I tried that link by egdctld, and I must be really stupid, but I can't make their sitemap generator work. Time to look for something simpler...

Jim_Westergren

Jul 26th 2005, 3:13 pm

Time to look for something simpler...

Try this one:

sitemapbuilder.net

Worked very well for me.

toocoolforschool

Jul 26th 2005, 5:49 pm

Thanks Jim that one works perfectly, and easy enough for a doofus like me to understand!

Jim_Westergren

Jul 26th 2005, 5:54 pm

Yeah, I also was very happy to get to that link.

I remember about a month ago when I tried to get this sitemap and I was reading the Google pages and didn't understand nada. Also their link to a 3rd party site map generator is/was broken.

On that site you get the site map in less than a minute.

Lynn Terry

Jul 26th 2005, 9:03 pm

Andre has a nice little blog them. Thanks for noting. He has a link here now.
www.skaffe.com/viewCat/83672 (http://www.skaffe.com/viewCat/83672)

Very cool - I'm sure he'll appreciate the link!

Wizard

Jul 26th 2005, 10:45 pm

I submitted 5 websites a couple of weeks ago and see 3 out of the 5 have the index page listed, but nothing else. The web sites have anywhere from 5 to 700 pages. I see Yahoo already has around 315 pages indexed, but not much from Google.

bobmutch

Jul 26th 2005, 10:56 pm

Lynn Terry: Here then have another one.
www.uncoverthenet.com/dir/16198/1.php (http://www.uncoverthenet.com/dir/16198/1.php)

bobmutch

Jul 26th 2005, 10:59 pm

Here is some info on sitemaps.
-- Stephen Brennan blogs up Google Sitemap For Idiots (http://www.searchenginejournal.com/index.php?p=1938) on Search Engine Journal.
-- Google Sitemap Generator (http://www.blocklayer.com/googlesitemap/) which is about as simple as they get.

domokun

Jul 27th 2005, 2:28 am

I used it and think its good. One of my sites was having trouble getting crawled. Submitted a sitemap and within a few days the entire site had been crawled.

toocoolforschool

Jul 27th 2005, 2:57 am

Huh, finally got a site spidered and listed. Go figure.

Klaas Koopman

Jul 27th 2005, 1:10 pm

I think it's quite hard to make a sitemap, will this google sitemap thing create it, so I can have a page on my website called: SITEMAP.php like other sites? or is it just something for submitting to google!