Google Sitemaps

I noticed that alot of people seem to be submitting .php versions of sitemaps to Google sitemaps. I have used a Mod Rewrite to make .xml pages run like a php page so that you can rename your .php page to .xml instead. here it is for those of you want it:

Just add this line to your .htaccess file in the directory of your sitemap

AddType application/x-httpd-php .htm .xml .rss

Hope this helps everyone, as I have seen a significant difference between submitting a .php and now an .xml extension instead with no changes to the code.

If anyone wants to have a look, let me know...

 

dont forget to change the contenttype you are sending out to make it XML

 

Thanks for the heads up

 

WordPress has a plugin which auto creates and pings after every update to a post/comment, so that helps your WordPress blogs get noticed.

Got to be a good thing if Google indexes you more - more indexed = more visitors...

 

We set our xml/via .php page to generate the most current info.

So when Google comes by, it will automatically regenerate the xml feed via the php script before it feeds Google this info. Seems to work great, and Google is eating it up.

 

The Google sitemap works. I have a site I just built and by using the sitemap I had all of my pages indexed within a few days.

 

It's not doing much for me at the moment. I think I submitted it about a week ago.

 

Ok I have a .php xml file sumbitted to google right now. What does the mod rewrite look for changing it to xml. Its in my main directory, and the above didn't seem to work.

http://mydomain.com/sitemap.php needs to be http://mydomain.com/sitemap.xml

Sorry. I've been stuck with the amount of pages indexed seeing if this does the trick.

 

Hey guys...
I see questions like I submitted my sitemap yesterday and Google still hasn't crawled the site. First since I started using Google’s sitemaps especially the first few weeks it has been somewhat un reliable finding errors in one run and then no problems next time it downloads it, once in a while it still does that, no worries thought they're working on it. I had a problem where my sitemap stopped being downloaded for no reason, just stopped for a bout a week, I wrote them an email and within few hours it was back to normal. In the email to Google I specified everything I did and they symptoms I was experiencing. so they are still working out the kinks.

Also depending on how popular your site is they may not want to crawl it every day, it uses up their resources and if the past few crawls your site wasn't updated all that much the crawler knows it.

I found that my PR3 site got re-index 2 days after the sitemap was downloaded, I did it as a test and changed the titles of my pages slightly and they appeared in Google only in a couple of days, so perhaps it works like a queue.

 

Fantastic way to get Googlebot to visit your page. Because I have three sites that are wordpress blogs, I downloaded a plug-in that automatically pings Google whenever I update/change something on my blogs. This is probably the easiest and most effective way for those running Wordpress blogs.

 

Seems like a few of my supporting pages are getting spidered, but we shall see. It's really hard to tell if it was just going to happen any ways, or if it has to do with the site map.

Brian

 

Can anyone tell me if the command "Site:nameofsite" shows all links indexed on google. I am trying to determine the status of our sitemap links that were taken by google, but the status area of the sitemaps is vague. So I thought doing a "site:mywebsite" would let me know. Is this very accurate way of knowing how many links I have indexed.

Thanks.

 

As I understand things, yes. The largest question is whether the page was indexed with the www or without (e.g. site:www.nameofsite vs. site:nameofsite). I have seen some differences in the past between the result sets.

 

Hmm, yes, "site:" lists all pages Google has indexed of your site so far.

 

Not sure if this helps but...
Just did a redesign on a site including renaming many pages without redirect. Once we were live, I submitted a sitemap which was downloaded successfully by Google around 2 weeks ago.

I did not include the old pages (they are still live) in the sitemap but fixed all the internal links so they point toward the new pages.

As of today site:www.mysite.com shows only the old pages, none of the new ones from the sitemap.

Yet

 

I've just redesigned my website and it's due for release next Wednesday. My current design is very old and doing a search for the topic on google finds the site on page 12. I've redesigned by the book in terms of how best to layout your site for SEO and will look to optimise the google sitemap when it launches next week. Fingers crossed the sitemap and the SEO stuff do their job because to be honest a lot of pages under my topic are complete dross.

 

Oh I was also going to ask 2 other questions.

1. How do you know when google has been sniffing around your site?
2. I see the option "cronjob" in my control panel. Has anyone got any instructions for creating a daily sitemap file?

 

Your server logs will show Google Bot visits. Like regular referral statistics.

I use Googles sitemap generator and added crons to run it automatically.
See the recurring part here:
http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/sitemap-generator.html#execute

 

Can someone who also uses Google sitemap generator (sitemap_gen.py) - tell how I can add specific directories and files so that they are excluded when building sitemap?

Let's say, I don't wan't directory "statistics" and not a file called "dontreadme.txt" included to sitemap.

What kind of line will work at the end of config.xml?

 

I will give it a try now