XML Sitemaps can seriously damage your health

A business associate of mine recently made a shocking discovery regarding site maps. He uploaded a new XML sitemap which temporarily destroyed his web sales within days. You can see the full story at http://blog.stinkyinkshop.co.uk/sitemap-hell.html

He realised was that the sitemap software set its own priorities based on the hierarchy of the database. Pages that were important to sales had been given a lower priority value because of where they were in relation to the database.

Has anyone else had experience of this?

Best Wishes

Geraldine

 

why using xml sitemaps?
weird..

 

What should I be using?

 

One of my websites rankings got completely destroyed by sitemaps. Sitemaps improve some sites but are a nightmare for others.

 

I think, if you understand how Google uses the sitemap to assess your site then they are beneficial. You must understand that the whole site is ranked relative to your index page which is 1 and it is the relative relationship to 1 that is important

 

so how to learn ... any link

 

here is an interview of Vanessa fox, (Google) talking about PR and sitemap
a myth killer. She explains the whole hierarchy of the pages with sitemaps.

Also, yes, it's not the first time I hear about sitemaps killing a website. They are good 95% of the time, but make sure you use it properly

 

Good post - very informative.

It's great to to hear SEO advice straight from the horses mouth rather than read a lot of speculative bull that gets posted up on here.

 

also see where a person then did a total redesign forgetting to update his site map. the site map led to invalid URLs thus killing his traffic due to 404s.

 

im not sure i believe this was the cause. could have been any number of things.sitemaps are about crawling not ranking

 

I think a lot of sitemap errors definitely effect rankings.
One of the sites I had sitemap problems with was a forum, the generator would only index member profiles instead of important forum categories and topics. I also blocked viewing member profiles through robots.txt so that lead to a lot of problems. I think it's important for webmasters to check for sitemap conflicts or other errors, it's better than risking your search engine positions.

 

I hadn’t realised site maps were that important. I've restricted some pages in my robots text that may have been in my site map, could this also be damaging!

 

yes definitely robots is a whole different ballgame

 

If you make a dynamically generated sitemap, always run it as a search engine would find your site - from the homepage down.

 

Be sure to use a sitemap program that reads, and obeys your robots.txt file. Such as http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

Even if your sitemap has files and folders that are marked Disallow in robots.txt, I would think that the webcrawlers would obey the robots.txt.

 

I've heard XML sitemaps can mess up your site. That's why I use a text sitemap. They are recommended for Yahoo but they work for Google as well.

 

yeah, maybe you have sitemap errors

 

Always check you sitemap and keep it updated all the time, bad links and missing url's might become a problem

 

that's bad luck... sitemaps are useful for more than 90% of the sites and are recommended.

 

that's why I use software that allows me to determine the priority of the individual pages